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I’d like to give some details on what is new on the new A13 Bionic GPU and #MetalAPI besides the performance and power improvements (1/13)
There are a lot of exciting new features and performance improvements that come with A13 Bionic GPU and #MetalAPI . We put together a presentation for our developers: developer.apple.com/tech-talks/608
13 Bionic GPU supports Argument Buffer Tier 2, i.e. bindless textures and samplers. With Indirect Command Buffers and Argument Buffer Tier 2, GPU-driven rendering designs become even easier than before. (3/13)
A13 Bionic GPU add sparse textures feature to #MetalAPI . This feature is driven entirely by the GPU as mapping and unmapping happens in the GPU timeline. We also added large number of performance data accessible to the developer. (4/13)
That helps texture streaming at a tile level, and tiles are 16K large resulting in great allocation granularity for the best texture streaming and framebuffer compaction. We also support fallback sampling and LOD clamping. #MetalAPI (5/13)
We also introduce a new technique: Rasterization Rate Maps with the A13 GPU fro #MetalAPI . This feature makes it possible to rasterize and shade at multiple resolutions. (6/13)
By separating virtual and physical dimensions of render targets and establishing non uniform mapping between the two, the feature allows the developers save shading in less important parts of the render target as well as save memory for the storage of the rendertarget. (7/13)
Another feature we added to A13 GPU/#MetalAPI is Vertex Amplification. This feature makes shared geometry attributes processed only once and results in eliminating duplicate fetch, shade and output. (8/13)
We are also expending our Quad Group Functions, such as max, broadcast, all and others to operate at SIMD Group level. #MetalAPI (9/13)
We also prepared a sample/demo code for Metal in general and A13 GPU features. This is the demo we showed at WWDC. #MetalAPI (10/13)
We added spares textures for streaming, rasterization rates for reducing shading and saving rendertarget storage and vertex amplification to reduce vertex loads for cascaded shadow maps. We will release it very soon. #MetalAPI (11/13)
Description of the features are up on our website already: developer.apple.com/tech-talks/608. There is a lot more details in the presentation which is 35 minutes long. #MetalAPI (12/13)
That is all for the major features. Let us know if you run into issues or have questions. #MetalAPI #A13Bionic (13/13)
