Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

11 Deferred Rendering

11.1 Overview

As graphics hardware has become more and more generic and programmable, applications 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 techniques 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 programs (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 advantages ...