Some electronic devices, e.g., computing systems, may include one or more graphics processors to execute graphics (or even general-purpose) instructions. Many mobile devices use a graphics architecture commonly referred to as sort-middle architecture, also referred to as a tiling architecture. Sort-middle, or tiling, architectures are efficient in terms of color and depth buffer memory traffic because they first sort geometry to tiles of a fixed size (e.g., 32×32 pixels), and when all geometry has been sorted, each tile can be rasterized and pixel-shaded, etc in parallel in any order. Thus, the local frame buffer can be stored on-chip and exactly one tile can be stored there per rasterization/pixel-pipeline. When all work is done, the result (color and possibly depth) may be written out to memory.
Most sort-middle architectures maintain a constant image quality over a complete image. This can consume significant resources and may limit the overall throughput of the graphics architecture.