Deferred Lighting

Motivation #

Many fragments are overwritten by the Rasterizer because a closer fragment was rendered later, thus the fragment shader work for those fragments was unneccessary.

How it works #

• Do the rasterization into a G-Buffer (Geometry buffer) which contains all fragment shader inputs.
• After that, shade all fragments in a second render pass

Evaluation #

Pros #

• Only visible fragments are shaded
• G-Buffer also useful for post-processing

Cons #

• Engine becomes more complicated
• Requires more memory
• MSAA costly and complex
• Translucent objects require forward rendering