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Re:The Apple GPU and the impossible bug by atq2119 on Friday May 13, 2022 @11:00AM (#31368541)
I was under that impression as well. If they write out all attributes, what is really the remaining difference to a traditional immediate more renderer? Nvidia reportedly has vertex attributes going through memory for many generations already (and they are at least partially tiled...).

I suppose the difference is whether the render target lives in the "SM" and is explicitly loaded and flushed (by a shader, no less!) or whether it lives in a separate hardware block that acts as a cache.

Re:The Apple GPU and the impossible bug by Jasper_ on Friday May 13, 2022 @11:23AM (#31368808)
NV has vertex attributes "in-pipe" (hence mesh shaders), and the appearance of a tiler is a misread, it's just a change to the macro-rasterizer about which quads get dispatched first, it's not a true tiler.

The big difference is the end of the pipe, as mentioned; whether you have ROPs or whether your shader cores load/store from a framebuffer segment. Basically, whether or not framebuffer clears are expensive (assuming no fast-clear cheats), or free.