Mali GPU Best Practices

Guide Contents

Guide structure

Graphics processing can be represented as a pipeline of processing stages that includes the application, the graphics driver, and the various hardware stages inside the GPU itself. Most stages follow a strict architectural pipeline, with outputs from one stage becoming the inputs into the next. Compute shaders are the one exception to this strict pipeline, as they simply write results back to resources stored in system memory, and therefore their outputs can be consumed by any stage in the pipeline which can consume those resources.

This guide is structured with topic ordering following this pipeline. Each topic provides recommendations which should be applied to processing running in that that pipeline stage. There are some generic topics such as shader program authoring advice which can apply to multiple pipeline stages; we've split these out into dedicated sections at the end of the document.

For each best practice topic we provide an explanation of the recommendation, and actionable do and don't technical points which should be considered during development. Where possible we also document the likely impact of not following the advice, and possible debugging techniques which could be applied.

Best practice Contents 

•  Preface
•  Overview
•  Optimizing application logic
•  CPU Overheads
•  Vertex shading
•  Tessellation, geometry shading, and tiling
•  Fragment shading
•  Buffers and textures
•  Compute
•  Shader code
•  System integration
•  Revisions