Deferred shading

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Deferred shading is a three dimensional shading technique in which the components of the lighting equation are rendered into multiple screensized render targets (MRTs). Lighting is then done using geometrically simple passes over these MRT buffers, fetching the components of the lighting equation and outputting lighting results. This results in less shaded depth complexity, less geometry processing, better batching, and a cleaner rendering pipeline^[1].

[edit] History

The idea of deferred shading was originally introduced by Michael Deering and his colleagues in a paper^[2] published in 1988 entitled The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics^[3]. Although the paper never uses the word "deferred", the concept that is presented therein, which is only recently becoming practical for applications such as games, is the same as the idea widely referred to as deferred shading in computer graphics circles today.

[edit] References

1. ^ NVIDIA SDK 9.51 - Featured Code Samples. NVIDIA (Jan 17, 2007). Retrieved on March 28, 2007.
2. ^ Deering, Michael; Stephanie Winner, Bic Schediwy, Chris Duffy, Neil Hunt. "The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics". ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 22 (4): 21 - 30. 
3. ^ Deferred Shading. NVIDIA. Retrieved on March 28, 2007.