Every Apple GPU is a tile-based deferred renderer (TBDR). Instead of writing intermediate results to DRAM and reading them back, the GPU processes each screen tile entirely in fast on-chip memory. This tutorial exploits that architecture with memoryless textures and tile shaders — eliminating the G-buffer bandwidth cost that conventional deferred rendering pays on every frame.

Screen tiles tile tile tile tile tile tile on-chip On-chip memory geometry lighting no DRAM round-trip DRAM G-buffer Each tile's G-buffer lives on-chip — never touches DRAM

What you’ll learn:

  • How Apple’s TBDR architecture differs from immediate-mode GPUs
  • Declaring G-buffer textures as memoryless to keep them on-chip
  • Writing tile shaders that run between render passes within a tile
  • Using .dontCare load/store actions to eliminate unnecessary memory traffic

Read the tutorial →