GPU Gems 3

Chapter 19. Deferred Shading in Tabula Rasa

Rusty Koonce NCsoft Corporation

This chapter is meant to be a natural extension of “Deferred Shading in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” by Oles Shishkovtsov in GPU Gems 2 (Shishkovtsov 2005). It is based on two years of work on the rendering engine for the game Tabula Rasa, a massively multiplayer online video game (MMO) designed by Richard Garriott. While Shishkovtsov 2005 covers the fundamentals of implementing deferred shading, this chapter emphasizes higher-level issues, techniques, and solutions encountered while working with a deferred shading based engine.

Introduction

In computer graphics, the term shading refers to the process of rendering a lit object. This process includes the following steps:

1. Computing geometry ...