Transaction Elimination (TE) is a key bandwidth saving feature of the Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPU architecture which allows for significant energy savings on a System on Chip (SoC) level.
When performing TE, the GPU compares the current frame buffer with the previously rendered frame and performs a partial update only to the particular parts of it that have been modified, thus significantly reducing the amount of data that need to be transmitted per frame to external memory.
TE can be used by every application for all frame buffer formats supported by the GPU, irrespective of the frame buffer precision requirements, and is highly effective, even on first-person shooter (FPS) games and video. In many other popular graphics applications where large parts of the frame buffer remain static between two consecutive frames, frame buffer bandwidth savings from TE can reach up to 99 percent.
Transaction Elimination offers a number of advantages:
- No impact to image quality
- Agnostic of frame buffer format
- Per tile comparison between frame buffers
- 16 x 16 pixels tile size
- CRC-based signature comparison
