Facinating behaviors of M1 GPU

[thedocbwarren]

I'm observing the behaviors while gaming on the M1 and it's so fascinating to see the artifacts of how the GPU works. Couple interesting observations:

• Checker pattern in layers rendered (clearly the chunked behavior) and some artifact of the game not knowing the framebuffer is not one large screen.
• Buffer overflows on complicated screens and messed up geometry
• texture inconsistency

Granted this is Rosetta 2 translated games. I see a lot of these on Elder Scrolls Online.

Any other observations?

 

[casperes1996]

• Checker pattern in layers rendered (clearly the chunked behavior) and some artifact of the game not knowing the framebuffer is not one large screen.

Hm. Interestingly, if the game was compiled prior to some specific version of the clang toolchain, and is under Rosetta, Metal should run in a form of "compatibility mode" that should take steps to try and simulate immediate mode rendering to try and avoid issues to do with the tile based renderer on titles expecting immediate mode rendering.

• Buffer overflows on complicated screens and messed up geometry
• texture inconsistency

What exactly do you mean by that? - What kind of texture inconsistencies? And buffer overflows?

 

[thedocbwarren]

Hm. Interestingly, if the game was compiled prior to some specific version of the clang toolchain, and is under Rosetta, Metal should run in a form of "compatibility mode" that should take steps to try and simulate immediate mode rendering to try and avoid issues to do with the tile based renderer on titles expecting immediate mode rendering.



What exactly do you mean by that? - What kind of texture inconsistencies? And buffer overflows?

So I've seen throughout a few games under Rosetta where it clearly is "overrun" and the geometry will deform. It always seems to be related to a kind of overflow. I suspect what you mention on the metal compat layer(these games seem to use MoltenVK.)

The buffer overflow seems to correct when vsync is enable (in some games) where it lowers the FPS and I'll see when this happens some low quality textures in spots.

Also I'll see the checked layers here and there on complicated scenes. I imagine if the game were full metal and actually compiled to ARM these artifacts would subside.