A look at the PowerVR graphics architecture: Tile-based rendering

By _Imagination Blog

October 10, 2024

I’m fond of telling the story about why I joined Imagination. It goes along the lines of: despite offers to go work on graphics in much sunnier climes, I took the job working on PowerVR Graphics here in distinctly un-sunny Britain because I was really interested in how Tile-Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR) could work in practice. My graphics career to-date had been mostly focused on the conceptually simpler Immediate Mode Renderers (IMRs) of the day – mostly GeForces and Radeons.

And no offence to the folks who designed said GeForces and Radeons – a few of whom I am friends with and many more I know quite well, but the front-end architecture of a modern discrete IMR GPU isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. Designed around having plenty of dedicated bandwidth, those GPUs go about the job of painting pixels in a reasonably inefficient way, but one that’s conceptually simple and manifests itself in silicon in a similarly simple way, which makes it relatively easy for the GPU architect to design, spec and have built by the hardware team.

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