i doubt nvidia is seriously frightened by the new kyro card or plan on aggressively pursuing tile based rendering (although i believe that was in the 3dfx bag of goodies).
"Beyond3D : Can traditional renderers overcome the problems that Tile-Based solutions solve through their structure? Like the rendering of 8-layer multitextured pixels that will never be visible, the horrible memory access patterns with smaller and smaller polygons (where many OD algorithms like early Z and hierarchical systems also fail to work effectively), the huge memory abuse when doing AA, costly stencil procedures, expensive memory-readback when doing multi-pass effects? Its easy to nag about the buffering issue that tilers might or might not have in the future, what about all these bottlenecks in traditional systems? Not to mention the issues when using more accurate frame buffers, 64bit floats?
Croteam : Tile-Based rendering can be a very good solution for the present time. But I don't think that it will hold much longer. Brute-force approach with its power, has already hit the limits of the monitor resolution. It all comes to two things: either developers will completely embrace tile-based rendering and adopt their engines to that, or we'll all stick to simplier brute force solutions. Tile based rendering will always be faster than brute-force, but who needs (potential) complications of TBR, when brute-force approach is already fast enough.
MadOnion : The technology is not as important as the end result. Currently best results have been achieved with the "traditional" 3D accelerator types. Both can be made to work, but a tile based system may probably be more cost-effective in the long run.
Basically, game developers could not care less how it's made if it renders fast, has good feature set and they don't need to think about any special cases.
NVIDIA : There are pros and cons to any architecture. I believe in the future, we are moving toward more and more geometry, as well as more and more per-pixel shading and computation. Both of these directions require more muscular and powerful pipelines. Tile-based renderers don't address these needs. The optimization provided by a tile-based renderer is that occluded pixels that don't contribute to the final picture also don't contribute to the bandwidth consumption at the memory. In the limit, a tile-based renderer optimizes out that redundance, and provides only a minimal impact to buffering and re-scanning of command streams and geometry. In the limit, a conventional renderer with occlusion culling has exactly the same performance. In each case, we have separated the visibility (what is on top) from the shading. "
from <A HREF="http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/croteammonv/index1.php" target="_new">http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/croteammonv/index1.php</A>