Develop - BUILD: Deferred rendering

No longer just a programming niche, deferred rendering is becoming an increasingly popular technique on consoles too…

As an option in the armoury of the programmer, deferred rendering has been around for a while. Released in 2007, PC shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was one of the first commercial titles to make use of the technique.

[Microsoft Xbox 360]

It is absolutely beautiful in Killzone 2. God I wish Socom had graphics like these.

[DJ]

Killzone 2 just looks way too good.

[Ju]

He he. I like how they downplay this method to promote their own UE3 engine :)

[Elven6]

They already do to a certain extent... straight from the article,

"Tim Sweeney, architect of the Unreal engine, highlights further visual challenges of using deferred rendering. “It’s faster for large numbers of lights and shadows, but the drawbacks are increased video memory usage, and artistic limitations as you force all objects to be rendered with the same material model,” he says “Unreal Engine 3 has an extremely flexible and artist-extensible material system, so we didn’t want to constrain this unnecessarily.”

Another issue is anti-aliasing. “Anti-aliasing is a key to the rendering quality of Gears of War,” Sweeney explains. “If you look closely, you’ll see that all static and dynamic lighting is anti-aliased with multisample anti-aliasing, so moving to a pure deferred rendering approach would be a step backward.”

Significantly though, UE3 does use some deferred elements, re-using z- and colour-buffers and techniques that would be otherwise impractical, such as velocity-buffered motion blur. And Sweeney is happy to concede that future hardware architectures might encourage the further use of deferred rendering. “I expect we’ll see developers inventing ever-cooler deferred techniques,” he says. “But the constraints assure that it won’t become the predominant rendering scheme, at least within this console generation.”"

[Bathyj]

I couldn't believe what I was reading.

When asked about Deferred rendering he starts crapping on about his own engine that debuted 10 years ago. You sound like a fanboy Sweeny.

And for the record, I thought Gears graphics, looked static, sterile and non-interactive.

[Ju]

You know what, if that's the definition of deferred rendering, then every engine does it, as long as they use a Z buffer. :)

Kind of the same, now store a little bit more info in that buffer then just Z and there you go, deferred rendering (like motion vectors, and what not).

And, I don't know, how they can say, deferred rendering has an impact on AA, when you clearly can have post rendering filters on the final buffer which can enhance the AA on a full scene.

At least, as far as I can tell, KZ2 has one of the best AAs seen on the PS3 so far.

Material is fine, does this also mean "reusing textures" over and over again ???

[Cock4Gamers]

USEZ DIFFERED RENDERINGGG!

[phosphor112]

N4G brought me to a worthy site...While I'm still in college, this is the area I want to go into, so this site is perfect for me. Oh, and I still think the UE3 engine sucks.

[mynd]

The method which they refer to as being first used in STALKER was used on the very first Xbox game, Shrek.
It's not new.