GPU Pro 5

5

IV

Tiled Deferred Blending

Ramses Ladlani

5.1 Introduction

Desktop and mobile GPUs are designed with very different goals in mind. While

the former mainly focuses on performance, the latter must strive for controlled

power consumption. This directly impacts the memory bandwidth, which often

constitutes the main performance bottleneck on mobile devices, especially when

using fillrate intensive effects such as alpha blending.

Some GPU manufacturers have come up with designs centered around a tile-

based architecture (e.g., Imagination Technologies PowerVR, ARM Mali, Qual-

comm Adreno) allowing for a fraction of the original bandwidth to be used. On

those