Embodiments of the present invention are directed towards increasing texture filtering performance for texel components represented by more than 8 bits. As the number of bits per component increases, the number of texels that are processed each clock cycle decreases since more bits need to be processed to produce each filtered result. A filtered result may be accumulated over two or more iterations, with each iteration producing a portion of the filtered result. When only a portion of the components for each texel are used, the unused texel components are not processed. Elimination of unnecessary texel processing for unused texel components may improve texture filtering performance.