Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Integrated graphics in Apple ARM processors may be better than discrete graphics cards



During a recent presentation, Apple announced the transfer of its computers to ARM processors and demonstrated their capabilities. In particular, the company showed work in various graphic editors and even the launch of the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Now it became more known about the integrated graphics in the "apple" chips.


During the next online session for developers, Apple employees talked about how to adapt Metal applications to ARM processors. Particular attention was paid to deferred tile rendering Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR). The technology allows you to capture the entire scene before starting to render it and divide it into several small fragments, each of which is processed separately. As a result, rendering is fast and does not need a lot of memory bandwidth.


On the other hand, Intel, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs rely on a fundamentally different rendering method - Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR). Its essence is in processing the entire scene as a whole. This technology is much less effective in comparison with TBDR and requires a lot of bandwidth.

“Don't think that a discrete graphics processor means better performance,” Apple said.

Apple's choice of TBDR is obvious, as this method performs frame processing noticeably faster and with less power consumption. However, it will be possible to draw any conclusions only after the appearance of “poppies” based on ARM processors. The first such computer should be released this year.

Source: 9to5mac.com


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