Hardware Encoder for Color Data in a 2D Rendering Pipeline

A method includes receiving multiple blocks of pixels of an image, wherein the blocks are to be sequentially encoded using a hardware-encoding pipeline; encoding a first block of the blocks by: generating a first hash to represent the first block; identifying a second hash stored in memory matching the first hash, the second hash (i) representing a second block of the blocks previously processed by the hardware-encoding pipeline and (ii) is associated with a tag corresponding to a placeholder for a second header associated with the second block; passing a copy of the tag through the hardware-encoding pipeline as metadata for the first block; determining that the second header is available; replacing the copy of the tag with the second header to generate a first encoding for the first block, wherein the second header specifies a memory region where a second encoding of the second block is stored.