Efficient Rendering with Tile Local Storage
Marius Bjørge Sam Martin
ARM Geomerics
Trondheim, Norway Cambridge, UK
marius.bjorge@arm.com sam.martin@geomerics.com
1. Introduction
The most significant difference between mobile GPUs and their
desktop equivalents is the availability of sustained memory
bandwidth. Without a revolution in mobile memory bandwidth
mobile graphics must be tailored to work efficiently in its
bandwidth-scarce environment. This is true at all levels of the
hardware-software stack. We showed previously that deferred
rendering could be made bandwidth efficient by exploiting the on-
chip memory used to store tile framebuffer contents in many tile-
based GPUs [Martin et al, 2013]. We refer to this memory as tile
local storage. In this talk, we build upon this research to
demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of tile local storage
with real world content. We show how key rendering challenges
can be met efficiently by use of tile local storage, and present an
updated extension that has cross-vendor support.
2. Practical lighting and shading
In our previous work lighting with tile local storage was shown to
be bandwidth efficient compared to traditional deferred lighting.
We explore this further by investigating performance in a
representative graphics pipeline on consumer devices. We take
existing content from the “Transporter” demo, built in a
commercial game engine, and demonstrate how physically-based
shading, deferred lighting and order-independent transparency can
be combined into a practical graphics pipeline. We describe a new
tile local storage OpenGL ES 3.0 extension for fragment shading
that has cross-vendor support and highlight the advances made
from the initial draft extension. We compare the extension to
multiple render target framebuffer read back and an alternative
approach for tile-based light culling when tile local storage is not
available.
3. Order-independent transparency
Efficient order-independent transparency (OIT) is a long standing
challenge. Traditional alpha blending requires per-fragment
sorting to correctly render overlapping surfaces which does not
admit a fixed bound on per-fragment storage. Sorted alpha
blending is a good approximation for thin surfaces, such as glass,
but overlapping surfaces can also be used to approximate
volumetric effects, such as smoke. In these circumstances, sorted
alpha blending is not prescribed by the underlying model and
alternative blending operations should be considered. We create
two variations of existing approximate OIT techniques that
enforce bounded storage [McGuire et al, 2013][Salvi et al, 2014].
We show how each can be adapted to use tile local storage,
reducing memory bandwidth and increasing performance.
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SIGGRAPH 2014, August 10 – 14, 2014, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
2014 Copyright held by the Owner/Author.
ACM 978-1-4503-2960-6/14/08
Sandeep Kakarlapudi Jan-Harald Fredriksen
ARM ARM
Trondheim, Norway Trondheim, Norway
sandeep.kakarlapudi@arm.com jan-harald.fredriksen@arm.com
For viewer-facing particle systems, sorting of triangles by either
the CPU or GPU is sufficient. In real-time games, where the cost
of sorting may be significant, sorting into a fixed number of depth
‘buckets’ can offer a useful performance-quality trade-off. We
investigate using tile local storage to store a fixed number of
buckets and defer sorting until fragment shading. This simple
approach has good performance but limited depth accuracy. We
present a variation that uses an additional per-fragment “depth
mask” which allows the buckets to adapt to the distribution of the
depth values. This trades some performance in favor of quality.
Figure 1. “Transporter” mobile graphics demo
4. Deferred virtual texturing
Virtual texturing encodes multiple textures into a single, large,
virtual texture and uses a page table mechanism to provide a
means of updating regions. We show how tile local storage can be
used to implement a deferred virtual texturing system. By
deferring all texturing to a full screen resolve pass we ensure only
visible fragments perform texture fetches, significantly reducing
texture bandwidth. This more unified approach to state and
texture handling provides further opportunities for savings on the
CPU by reducing the number of draw calls required.
5. Tile local rendering pipelines
A uniquely expressive property of tile local storage is the
persistence across draw calls and shader program changes within
the lifetime of the framebuffer. This persistence allows the results
of a shader program to be passed to the subsequent one. We show
how the techniques described can be combined into a single tile
local rendering pipeline, eliminating main memory transfers.
References
MARTIN, S., BJØRGE, M., KAKARLAPUDI, S., FREDRIKSEN, J. 2013.
Challenges with High Quality Mobile Graphics. ACM
SIGGRAPH Mobile 2013
MCGUIRE, M., BAVOIL, L. 2013. Weighted Blended Order-
Independent Transparency. Journal of Computer Graphics
Techniques (JCGT), vol. 2, no. 2, 122-141
SALVI, M., VAIDYANATHAN, K. 2014. Multi-Layer Alpha
Blending. Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games