Durango and Tile Based Deferred Rendering

[Proelite]

Durango won't be using Tile Based Deferred Rendering

Some background about tile based deferred rendering:

http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/insider/powervr_presentations/GDC HardwareAndOptimisation.pdf

Talisman-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Talisman

Tile base deferred shading-
http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/directx-11-rendering-in-battlefield-3
http://visual-computing.intel-research.net/art/publications/deferred_rendering/

With the onboard low-latency esram and limited bandwidth to main ram, it seems as if TBDR is perfect for Durango.

Dreamcast 2.0?

Tiling doesn't mean TBDR. There are a lot of tilers currently out there but only one TBDR GPU family (that I'm aware of). Most of them don't do the deferred part in hardware, unless you use deferred to be "scene capturing" (which some have in the past, but you really shouldn't). Odds of Durango using TBDR are close to zero.

So let's just talk about tiling. Having dedicated, directly addressable tile memory doesn't automatically mean you have tiling hardware. You could say that XBox 360 had less tiling hardware than other tilers - it let you mark primitives as fully captured by a tile so they didn't have their geometry processed for later tiles. But this is still just a partial approach. A full one would be an engine that bins primitives into tiles before rendering begins.

Will Durango have full tiling hardware? I doubt it. The bigger the tiling space is, the less this makes sense, and 32MB is pretty big. Bottom line, I doubt AMD went out of their way to change their established GPU designs into something quite different. I expect Durango to be more converged with AMD's PC GPU designs than XBox 360 was, not less.

 

[Exophase]

Tiling doesn't mean TBDR. There are a lot of tilers currently out there but only one TBDR GPU family (that I'm aware of). Most of them don't do the deferred part in hardware, unless you use deferred to be "scene capturing" (which some have in the past, but you really shouldn't). Odds of Durango using TBDR are close to zero.

So let's just talk about tiling. Having dedicated, directly addressable tile memory doesn't automatically mean you have tiling hardware. You could say that XBox 360 had less tiling hardware than other tilers - it let you mark primitives as fully captured by a tile so they didn't have their geometry processed for later tiles. But this is still just a partial approach. A full one would be an engine that bins primitives into tiles before rendering begins.

Will Durango have full tiling hardware? I doubt it. The bigger the tiling space is, the less this makes sense, and 32MB is pretty big. Bottom line, I doubt AMD went out of their way to change their established GPU designs into something quite different. I expect Durango to be more converged with AMD's PC GPU designs than XBox 360 was, not less.

 

[(((interference)))]

Bgassassin just shot down this TBDR speculation himself

So it seems to be wishful thinking