Apple offers an in-depth look at the A13 Bionic GPU's Metal Engine enhancements

Apple's new iPhones have a lot going on, but the A13 Bionic is what powers them all. Apple's new SoC is fabbed on TSMC's new 7nm EUV process and packs in a cool 8.5 billion transistors. One of the touted features in the A13 Bionic is the 20% higher GPU performance with a 40% lesser power consumption. Apple has released a new developer video that explains some of the improvements on the GPU side of things. 

The A13 Bionic's GPU brings improvements in three main areas — performance, architecture improvements, and Metal features. The A13's GPU offers 2x faster FP16 texture filtering for improved HDR along with improvements in parallel render and compute processing. 

Apple detailed some of the A13's new Metal features such as Sparse textures, Rasterization Rate Maps, and more. Sparse textures allow for controlling which Metal textures you want to store on a special memory space called a Sparse Heap. This allows for texture streaming by loading only the mipmaps needed for the current view.

Another improvement that allows for better GPU utilization is rasterization rate maps (RRM). RRM allows for displaying the areas of the image that matter most at the highest resolution. Those areas that are not really perceivable at rasterized at lower resolutions to save GPU bandwidth.

Apple says that these, combined with other Metal enhancements such as Vertex Amplification, Tier-2 Argument Buffer, new SIMD instructions, and ASTC HDR play a role in the A13's quad-core GPU's faster GPU performance with significantly reduced power consumption compared to the A12 Bionic. 

Check out the full presentation in the Source link below for a more comprehensive overview of Metal improvements in Apple's latest SoC.