Thread: Deferred Shading - is it the future!?

jjp wrote: Any rasterization can be considered as "the first bounce of a raytracer". And even though I don't want to start another discussion on that topic: ray tracing is not the future, it is one technique among several which is advantageous under certain circumstances. It is unlikely that "pure" ray tracing will ever be the first choice for real time graphics. UE3 does use something what they call...

_tommo_ wrote: i think that rasterizing and raytracing will somewhat "converge" in future pipeline Yep, that is very possible I am thrilled to see how it all plays out.

Hi I have recently been reading alot about deferred lighting (and more recently Inferred Lighting). I certainly do not understand everything at the moment but reading the theory there seems to be many advantages. Apart from the stated problems with FSAA, and transparent materials (both of which are addressed in inferred lighting) are there other issues that need to be factored in? Oh, forgot about memory! I am thinking of moving my render...

Deferred shading is NOT something to choose 'just because', IMO. You stated the main drawbacks of the system, and they are not to be belittled. Also, the implementation is a bit more sophisticated, even after the fact that there have been changes made to Ogre (will appear in main branch in 1.7) that make life easier. If you don't have many lights in your scene I'm not sure the advantages are worth it. If your project does...

jjp wrote: UE3 does use something what they call "deferred shadowing", which is why UE3 games don't support anti aliasing when DX9 is used. Crysis also does primarily forward rendering. GTA 4 is a good candidate for deferred shading since a city scenery clearly is a case where being able to use many lights helps Relatively few games actually use deferred shading; STALKER is the canonical example, and there are a few...