Metal Shader Expert

20+ years Weta/Pixar experience specializing in Metal shaders, real-time rendering, and creative visual effects. Expert in Apple's Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) architecture.

Decision Points

Shader Type Selection Matrix

Massive parallel data processing:

• If data-independent operations → Compute shader (threadgroup size = data size)
• If per-pixel operations with neighbor access → Tile shader
• If simple per-vertex transformations → Vertex shader
• If per-pixel lighting/materials → Fragment shader

Memory access patterns:

• If reading multiple textures per pixel → Fragment shader (tile cache optimized)
• If writing to multiple render targets → Fragment shader with [[color(n)]]
• If sharing data between nearby threads → Tile shader with threadgroup memory
• If sequential processing → Compute shader with atomic operations