Tiled rendering

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Tiled rendering is the process of subdividing ("tiling") 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:

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 of 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.

Xbox 360: the GPU contains an embedded 10mb framebuffer; this is not sufficient to rasterize an entire 1280x720 image with 4x anti-aliasing, so a tiling solution is superimposed.