Deferred Rendering - Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11 - page 486

11

Deferred Rendering

11.1 Overview

As graphics hardware has become more and more generic and programmable, applica-
tions employing real-time 3D graphics have begun to explore alternatives to traditional
rendering pipelines, in order to avoid their disadvantages. One of the most popular tech-
niques currently in use is known as deferred rendering. This technique is primarily geared
toward supporting large numbers of dynamic lights without a complex set of shader pro-
grams (see Figure 11.1). It has been successfully integrated into engines made by Crytek
(Mittring, 2009), Naughty Dog (Balestra & Engstad, 2008) (Hable, 2010), and Guerrilla
Games (Valient, 2007).
This chapter provides a brief introduction of deferred rendering that covers its advan-
tages and disadvantages, while the following sections explore a basic Direct3D 11 imple-
mentation of both traditional deferred rendering and light pre-pass deferred rendering. The
final three sections take things a step further and explore how Direct3D 11 features can be
exploited to improve both the quality and performance of a deferred renderer.

11.1.1 Problems with Forward Rendering

One of the most important aspects in designing a renderer is determining how to handle
lighting. Lighting is extremely important, since it deals with calculating the intensity and
color of light reflecting off surface geometry at a particular point, which becomes the most

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