Post
A rendering technique that divides the screen into 3D frustum clusters, computing only the lights relevant to each cluster.
Forward shading gets expensive with many lights because every surface has to check every light. Deferred shading handles many lights but struggles with transparency and MSAA. Clustered rendering splits the view frustum into a 3D grid and assigns lights only to the clusters they touch, giving forward-shading the scalability of deferred without its downsides. It became the default for modern engines around 2015.
Example
Doom (2016) uses clustered forward shading, famously allowing hundreds of dynamic lights without stutter. Unreal Engine 4 and 5 use clustered forward as an option. DICE's Frostbite popularized the clustered approach in AAA around 2014.
Why it matters
Clustered rendering is why modern games can have dozens of dynamic lights without framerate collapse. It is one of those foundational technique shifts that quietly redefined what scenes looked like possible in real-time.
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