It's actually funny that some are saying that deferred rendering in hw means something else and deferred rendering means in sw means something else.
In Falanx's old "Competitive Advantages..." flyer, they talk about being an IMR; subsequent marketing is what confused the matter.
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I imagine Adreno works a little like Xenos, with obvious exceptions for the eDRAM, and Dave wrote a good article here on that.
We depth test and only rasterise visible geometry.3dcgi said:Does Imagination render depth only first or sort prior to final rasterization and this is the distinction? I think I remember talk about sorting in the past.
Come on, John, TBDR have their own difficulties which Yamato/Adreno did not inherit precisely because it's an IMR with early-z and binning, and not a deferred shading gpu. Outside of binning, the two architectures are as different as IMR is from TBDR. And I feel awkward by even mentioning this to you : )That's another classic, they tried to claim they where somehow a hybrid IMR/TBR and also claimed that this meant they where "more" compatible than "traditional" tile based rendering solutions, when in fact they where just taking all the difficulties associated with TBR while removing some of the advantages of true TBDR.
Come on, John, TBDR have their own difficulties which Yamato/Adreno did not inherit precisely because it's an IMR with early-z and binning, and not a deferred shading gpu. Outside of binning, the two architectures are as different as IMR is from TBDR. And I feel awkward by even mentioning this to you : )
JohnH was referring to Mali there in the comment about the "hybrid IMR/TBR".
All of the designers in the mobile GPU space have presented really strong offerings, actually. So, their classification amounts to little more than a label; a rose by any other name and all that.
The first Qualcomm design which came from Ati was quite different from Xenos' binning which was not a TBDR and my understanding is the first post Ati design is exclusively a TBDR.
I assume the definition is to bin the scene and don't start rasterization until binning is completed, though it seems JohnH is using a subtly different definition which I don't understand. Is there a document from Imagination explaining their definition? Does Imagination render depth only first or sort prior to final rasterization and this is the distinction? I think I remember talk about sorting in the past.
Xenos had very coarse grained binning, but Qualcomm uses much smaller tiles so the packet based approach was no good and required a different design.
Yamato (Ati) had some hardware assist for binning and Yoda (Qualcomm) takes it further. I don't know how much driver involvement is necessary relative to IMG's designs.The tiles are smaller than Xenos, but they're also a much larger than the ones you'd find in SGX or Mali designs. I couldn't say exactly how large it is in Adreno implementations, I just know that it's up to 256KB for i.MX53 which is equivalent to the original z430/Adreno 200. Rendering an 800x480 or so framebuffer with 32bpp color and 32-bit depth/stencil on would take about 12 tiles.
I was under the impression that the approach still has rasterization operating per-tile and not with full scene binning first, and I wasn't aware of any sort of hardware binner to assist with this. I guess the question is exactly what the drivers are doing in order to decouple vertex shading from rasterization in order to avoid having to perform multiple passes on the vertexes per-tile.
Yamato (Ati) had some hardware assist for binning and Yoda (Qualcomm) takes it further. I don't know how much driver involvement is necessary relative to IMG's designs.
I don't know how much driver involvement is necessary relative to IMG's designs.
The Yamato spec (prior to it being acquired by Qualcomm) is the source for the first. I don't remember who told me about Yoda though I couldn't quote or link anything anyway.Any source for this?
The Yamato spec (prior to it being acquired by Qualcomm) is the source for the first. I don't remember who told me about Yoda though I couldn't quote or link anything anyway.