RenderPasses can give some perf gain on mobile tiler hardware, but they don't really help on desktop hardware. A lot of content is ported from other APIs, and

RenderPasses can give some perf gain on mobile tiler hardware, but they don't really help on desktop hardware. A lot of content is ported from other APIs, and retrofitting render passes to an existing engine is not easy. I'm hoping that accessing tile memory from compute shaders (like Metal's tile shaders) comes to Vulkan soon. That, together with the new pipeline barriers, will give all the benefits of render passes on mobile, but gets rid of the verbose up front setup of RenderPass.