Metal Tutorial 6 — GPU-Driven Rendering
In every previous tutorial the CPU decides what to draw and when. This one removes the CPU from the render loop entirely. A compute shader reads the scene, culls what’s invisible, and writes draw commands directly into an MTLIndirectCommandBuffer — the GPU issues its own draw calls. This is the architecture behind modern game engines on Apple platforms.
What you’ll learn:
- Encoding draw commands with
MTLIndirectCommandBuffer - Bindless resource access via argument buffers
- Suballocating buffers and textures from a single
MTLHeap - Running a compute dispatch to cull objects and populate the ICB on the GPU