Clustered rendering can be done both deferred and forward. They do a few things which are reminiscent of deferred, as you say. But what really makes a render d

Clustered rendering can be done both deferred and forward. They do a few things which are reminiscent of deferred, as you say. But what really makes a render deferred is the use of the gbuffer pass to only cull and collect data, followed by a rendering pass over a screen quad doing fragment shading with no potential overlap or wasted processing. Of course, you do get similar advantages from the depth prepass.