Deferred rendering refers to any rendering technique that defers the calculation of one or more components of a rendered frame to a screen-space operation using information that has been collected during one or more attribute collection passes.

One of the benefits of deferred rendering over forward rendering is that it can simplify and improve the performance of implementations using many lights and support better GPU utilization. It does, however, require extra texture memory for a G-Buffer, and can introduce complexities around the implementation of multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) and transparencies.

There are a number of deferred rendering techniques with their own pros and cons. We will present a classic deferred rendering technique in this chapter. The same basic concepts can be applied across techniques although the number of rendering passes and/or the information recorded at each stage may vary. Other techniques such as tiled deferred rendering may also make use of compute...