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[Owen Smith]

The core distinction comes down to where the depth test happens relative to off-chip memory. Immediate-mode desktop GPUs issue primitives and write every shaded pixel straight to the framebuffer, so overdraw and hidden-surface writes cost real GDDR bandwidth regardless of whether those pixels survive the final composite. TBDR instead rasterizes the frame into spatial tiles, runs hidden surface removal inside on-chip SRAM, and only persists pixels that actually pass—so a heavily occluded scene (think foliage, UI overlays, or dense particle systems) can be dramatically cheaper on an ARM/Apple pipeline even at the same fillrate. The edge case you’ll hit first is tile-buffer overflow: when a tile’s depth/stencil/sample data exceeds the local SRAM budget, the GPU spills to main memory and suddenly pays the very bandwidth penalty TBDR was supposed to avoid. That’s why tile resolution and MSAA sample count interact non-linearly—if your tile size × samples overruns the buffer, you

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