This is a lighting technique that lately has increased a lot in popularity. The normal way of shading is to perform the lighting calculations on a fragment when it is rasterized to the screen. This is often good but requires a lot of calculations if there are many lights. And the bad thing is that this fragment might later on be overwritten by some other fragment so the calculations might be a waste.
In deferred lighting (or deferred shading, or deferred rendering), you save the information about the fragment that is necessary to perform the shading (lighting) by rendering them to textures instead of doing the actual lighting calculation. When all geometry is rendered, the lighting will now be calculated only once per pixel on the screen. So no calculations will be wasted. You can perhaps say that it is some sort of a lazy evaluator.
The information saved per fragment is often:
- position ( or just depth )
- albedo ( the diffuse texture )
- normal
- specular
And these are sometimes also used:
- shininess
- material ID (for selecting material behaviour)
When all geometry has been rendered and it’s time to perform the lighting, the lights needs to be represented as something when sent to rasterization. Point lights can be drawn either as spheres or just square billboards. Directional light should be drawn as a full screen rectangle. And spotlights will be cones. Note that this shading technique allows for lights shaped in any form, not just these traditional ones.
The big reason for using deferred rendering is how well it scales with more lights. Another reason that it has increased in popularity lately is how nice it works with new rendering methods like SSAO and depth of field. The problem areas with deferred lighting is transparent objects and multisampling (antialiasing). If the original scene didn’t have per pixel lighting (but instead maybe vertex lightning) on the whole scene then the deferred rendering might be slower than traditional rendering.
Deferred Lighting example
Explanation of deferred lighting (and source code)
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/19/
Deferred Rendering in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
Explanation of how deferred lighting was used in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter09.html
The result of the deferred rendering XNA tutorial
A very good tutorial of how to implement deferred lighting in XNA 2.0. This is good reading even when you are rendering in an other API.
http://www.ziggyware.com/readarticle.php?article_id=155
A long discussion on the gamedev.net forum of pros and cons of using deferred rendering compared to traditional forward rendering.
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=424979
DirectX9 implementation if deferred shading, and some optimization talk
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/shaderx2/Tips_and_Tricks_with_ DirectX_9.pdf
Deferred Lightning in Leadwerk Engine
Info about the implementation of deferred shading in the Leadwerks Engine.
http://www.leadwerks.com/files/Deferred_Rendering_in_Leadwerks_Engine.pdf
Deferred Lighting in Killzone 2
A presentation about deferred lighting in the game Killzone 2:
http://www.guerrilla-games.com/publications/dr_kz2_rsx_dev07.pdf
