Method is disclosed for reducing frame buffer, stream buffer, reconstruction buffer, or latency associated with frame buffer compression in an encoder or decoder with multiple slices of an image frame. The image frame is divided into multiple slices vertically, horizontally or both. One core compressor or decompressor can be used to process two or more slices. The encoding and decoding of two or more slices may be performed in parallel. Instead of encoding an entire slice, the encoder compresses only partial data of one slice before encoding another slice. According to one embodiment, each slice is divided into two or more partitions. The encoder is switched to another slice after encoding one partition of one slice. In another embodiment, the encoder is switched to another slice based the information related to the coding status. The decoding order may be same as the encoding order.