Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

The GPU frontend

The frontend refers to the part of the rendering process where the GPU handles vertex data. Let's understand how it works:

1. The frontend will receive mesh data from the CPU (a big bundle of vertex information), and a draw call will be issued.
2. The GPU then gathers all pieces of vertex information from the mesh data and passes them through vertex shaders, which are allowed to modify them and output them in a 1-to-1 manner.
3. From this, the GPU now has a list of primitives to process (triangles—the most primitive shapes in 3D graphics).
4. Next, the rasterizer takes these primitives and determines which pixels of the final image will need to be drawn on to create the primitive based on the positions of its vertices and the current ...