Tiled rendering

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Tiled Rendering the process of subdividing a scene by a regular grid in image space, to facilitate the use of limited hardware rendering resources later in the pipeline.

Major examples of this are:-

  • The PowerVR rendering architecture. The rasterizer consisted of a 32x32 tile into which polygons were rasterized across the image across multiple pixels in parallel. On early PC versions, tiling was performed in the display driver running on the CPU. In the application in the Sega Dreamcast console, tiling was performed by a piece of hardware. This facilitated deferred rendering - only the visible pixels were texture-mapped, saving shading calculations and texture-bandwidth.
  • On the XBox 360, the GPU contains a embedded 10mb framebuffer; this is not sufficient to rasterize an entire 1280x720 image with 4x anti-aliasing, so a tiling solution is superimposed.
  • Implementations of Reyes rendering often divide the image into tile buckets.