Tile-based rendering is a promising technique for low-power, 3D graphics platforms. This technique de- composes a scene into smaller regions called tiles and ren- ders the tiles one-by-one. The advantage of this scheme is that a small memory integrated on the graphics accelerator can be used to store the color components and z (depth) val- ues of one tile, so that accesses to these values are local, on- chip accesses which consume significantly less power than off-chip accesses. Tile-based rendering, however, requires that the primitives (commonly triangles) and state changes are sorted into bins corresponding to the tiles. In this paper we determine the optimal state change operations (e.g., en- able/disable z testing, create/delete a texture) that should be included for each tile. Experimental results obtained using several suitable 3D graphics workloads show that various trade-offs can be made and that, usually, better performance can be obtained by trading it for memory.
