The advantage to this design is that the amount of memory and bandwidth is reduced compared to immediate mode rendering systems that draw the entire frame at once.
From this world view, a series of polygons (typically triangles) is created that approximates the original models as seen from a particular viewpoint, the camera.
By the time it reaches the end of the pipeline the images are so large that typical graphics card designs often use specialized high-speed memory and a very fast computer bus to provide the required bandwidth to move the image in and out of the various sub-components of the pipeline.
This sort of support is possible on dedicated graphics cards, but as power and size budgets become more limited, providing enough bandwidth becomes expensive in design terms.
There are also possible issues when the tiles have to be stitched together to make a complete image, but this problem was solved long ago[citation needed].
Over time, these were largely supplanted by immediate-mode GPUs with fast custom external memory systems.
Major examples of this are: Examples of non-tiled architectures that use large on-chip buffers are: Due to the relatively low external memory bandwidth, and the modest amount of on-chip memory required, tiled rendering is a popular technology for embedded GPUs.
Current examples include: Tile-based immediate mode rendering (TBIM): Tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR): Vivante produces mobile GPUs which have tightly coupled frame buffer memory (similar to the Xbox 360 GPU described above).