A method and apparatus for a three-dimensional encoding or decoding system incorporating view synthesis prediction (VSP) with reduced computational complexity and/or memory access bandwidth are disclosed. The system applies the VSP process to the texture data only and applies non-VSP process to the depth data. Therefore, when a current texture block in a dependent view is coded according to VSP by backward warping the current texture block to the reference picture using an associated depth block and the motion parameter inheritance (MPI) mode is selected for the corresponding depth block in the dependent view, the corresponding depth block in the dependent view is encoded or decoded using non-VSP inter-view prediction based on motion information inherited from the current texture block.