In this article we will learn about mipmapping, an important technique for rendering textured objects at a distance. We will find out why mipmapping is important, how it complements regular texture filtering, and how to use the blit command encoder to generate mipmaps efficiently on the GPU.
In this article, we will discuss an important technique for efficiently drawing many objects with a single draw call: instanced rendering. This technique helps you get the most out of the GPU while keeping memory and CPU usage to a minimum.
The sample app for this post renders several dozen animated cows moving on top of a randomly-generated terrain patch. Each cow has its own position, orientation, and movement direction, all of which are updated every frame. We do all of this drawing with only two draw calls. The app consumes only a few percent of the CPU, but maxes out the GPU, drawing over 240,000 triangles per frame. Even with this large load, the device manages to render at an ideal 60 frames per second.