LPGPU.org

Sam Martin from Geomerics gave at joint talk with ARM during the SIGGRAPH Mobile track this July. The talk, “Challenges with High Quality Mobile Graphics” [pdf], presented new ways to perform efficient dynamic lighting on tile-based GPUs. Using a development board and experimental driver extensions provided by ARM, Geomerics developed “on-chip” alternatives to the traditional but bandwidth-heavy deferred lighting rendering technique. We compared the performance and bandwidth utilisation of these new techniques against a regular off-chip deferred rendering using the recent MRT support in OpenGL ES 3.0, and a forward renderer. We find the bandwidth and power savings of on chip lighting are considerable, saving at least 1 GB/s in a conservative 720p resolution scenario, and much more at higher screen resolutions. We anticipate these techniques becoming available more widely inside the next year.