Back end bottlenecks

The back end is the more interesting part of the GPU pipeline, as many more graphical effects take place during this stage. Consequently, it is the stage that is significantly more likely to suffer from bottlenecks.

There are two brute force tests we can attempt:

  • Reduce resolution
  • Reduce texture quality

These changes will ease the workload during two important stages at the back end of the pipeline: fill rate and memory bandwidth, respectively. Fill rate tends to be the most common source of bottlenecks in the modern era of graphics rendering, so we will cover it first.

Fill rate

By reducing screen resolution, we have asked the rasterization system to generate significantly fewer fragments and transpose them over a smaller canvas ...

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