Possible to turn off multibuffering/doublebuffering in Metal?

Question

In reading about the PowerVR alpha drivers for Vulkan, they note that multibufering needs to be performed explicitly. Since Vulkan and Metal are so similar, can I actually turn off multibuffering altogether? I am willing to sacrifice throughput for low latency.

http://blog.imgtec.com/powervr/trying-out-the-new-vulkan-graphics-api-on-powervr-gpus

As a bonus, is it possible to avoid double buffering? I know racing the beam is coming back into style on the desktop but I don't know if mobile display tech supports simple single-buffering.

Answer 1

Double buffering is not about throughput and in fact for most modern GPUs the latency increases in single buffered operation.

I know racing the beam is coming back into style on the desktop

Most certainly not, because racing the beam works only if you can build your image scanline by scanline. However realtime graphics these days operate by sending triangles to the GPU to rasterize and the GPU has some leeway in the order in which it is touching the pixels. Also the order of the triangles relative to the screen continuously changes.

Last but not least all modern graphics systems these days are composited, which goes contrary to racing the beam.