I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Maxwell or Navi were doing tiled deferred rendering, but all evidence (as well as technical documentation) point to

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Maxwell or Navi were doing tiled deferred rendering, but all evidence (as well as technical documentation) point to them doing tiled immediate rendering. The tests in question rely on an atomic variable to draw only a limit amount of fragments, and it is very clear that rasterization proceeds tile by tile, with obvious geometry binning. Which is the very definition of tiled rendering. The big difference between a modern desktop GPU and a run-of-the-mill mobile GPU is that the former uses much larger tiles and smaller binning buffers, so you start spilling tiles after just several dozen primitives. Desktop GPUs implement tiling primarily to improve memory access locality. Mobile GPUs on the other hand heavily invest into tiling because it is the basis of their existence, they wouldn't be able to do anything with that low power budget otherwise. > However, there are mobile GPUs (Qualcomm's Adreno) that > dynamically switch between tiled deferred mode and immediate > mode on a per renderpass basis I've seen multiple mentions that Adreno supports TBDR, but no actual evidence for it. When asked, folks usually give me some link or documentation that describes immediate mode tiled rendering. AFAIK, "real" TBDR has only ever been achieved by Imagination and Apple inherited it from it and deployed it at a large scale.