Tile based rendering

A bit random, but still graphic related.. Just for a slightly different discussion :)

For some reason, I just remembered the Power VR range of GFX card. Though I've never owned any of their products, I was at one point eagerly waiting for the Kyro's sucessor (never released - probably not even designed).

Over the years, ATI and nVidia has continued to use faster memory and added to their own bandwidth optimising technologies (Hyper Z for ATI - I am pretty sure there is something similar for nVidia cards).

Going from a strictly what-if point of view, would there any benefits of tile based rendering nowadays? And how much has bandwidth optimising technology used by ATI/nVidia improved over the years?

ATI uses some tile based rendering type features in the Radeon, thats part of what Hyper Z does, Crossfire uses tile based rending too to split the scene up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Multi_Rendering

I think it may have been one of those concepts that worked very well at the time (e.g. RISC) but now the best ideas have been taken from it and incorporated into other architectures.