Apple metal gpu free#

To complement the existing SIMD-group directional shuffle functions ( simd_shuffle_down, simd_shuffle_rotate_down, simd_shuffle_rotate_up, and simd_shuffle_up), Metal on A15 Bionic includes the new simd_shuffle_and_fill_up, simd_shuffle_and_fill_down functions, which fill in the shifted-from vector indices from an ancillary data vector, rather than leaving them containing the values from the original vector.

Metal’s SIMD-group instructions continue to get more powerful from year to year, and this release is no exception. This technique closely follows the outline of Cem Cebenoyan’s GDC 2014 talk on sparse shadow maps.Īlthough not demonstrated in this year’s Apple video, certain uses of sparse textures can make use of texture access counters to determine which regions should be made resident from frame to frame. In the A15 Bionic tech talk, this feature is demonstrated through an explanation of Sparse Tiled Shadow Mapping (STSM).

Apple metal gpu free#

For example, the base mip levels of high-resolution texture maps could be unmapped when the mesh to which they apply is distant from the camera, to free up texture memory for objects closer to the camera.Ī15 Bionic introduces support for sparse depth and stencil textures, expanding the set of supported sparse texture pixel formats. Tiles can be dynamically mapped and unmapped to respond to the needs of the application. Introduced in A13 Bionic, sparse textures allow you to control which regions (tiles) of large textures you want to keep in memory. Now we turn our attention to another enhanced feature that can also enable significant memory savings: sparse depth and stencil textures. This implies that reading back texture data on the CPU will entail an additional blit operation (along with the usual latency-stall tradeoff). However, they cannot be used with shader write operations, which precludes some compute use cases.įinally, lossy textures must use the private storage mode they cannot be in shared or managed storage. In terms of operations, lossy textures can be render targets, can be the source or destination of blit operations, and can be sampled and read. However, packed formats are not supported. Most pixel formats support lossy compression, including 10-bit extended range formats. This will be increasingly important as mobile display resolutions and pixel densities continue to rise over the coming years. Lossy compression is applicable to most texture types 1, but it is perhaps most useful for reducing the size of intermediate and final render targets, where the accumulation of compression artifacts is minimal. For many use cases, this will be the only required change to take advantage of lossy compression. lossy in Swift) enables lossy compression. The new compressionType property on MTLTextureDescriptor holds a member of the MTLTextureCompressionType enum, and specifying MTLTextureCompressionTypeLossy (. The API surface for enabling lossy compression is minimal. The new lossy compression in A15 Bionic provides 50% memory savings with relatively little loss in visual fidelity. iPhone XS), and A14 Bionic improved frame buffer compression an additional 15% last year. A12 Bionic introduced lossless compression in 2018’s flagship devices (e.g. The enhancements we will discuss fall into three categories:Ī15 Bionic is not the first A-series chip to include on-the-fly texture compression. The tech talk is the best official source of nitty-gritty details on the new chip, but I wanted to take the opportunity to add some commentary and context. An example of the difference in visual fidelity between lossless and lossy render targets, from the “Discover advances in Metal for A15 Bionic” tech talk (2021). With the advent of iPhone 13 comes a new generation of Apple-designed system-on-a-chip: the A15 Bionic.Īs has become expected, Apple has published a developer-oriented tech talk to explain the new and enhanced GPU features included in this latest cutting-edge offering.