Abstract: An apparatus and method are described for texture compression. For example, one embodiment of a method comprises: determining a distance between each of a plurality of texture block texels and each of a plurality of points; determining a set of texel color values sampled over the texture block; and generating a set of approximation coefficients to compress the texture block using the distance between each of the plurality of texture block texels and each of the plurality of points and the set of texel color values sampled over the texture block.