An Evaluation of Deferred Shading under Changing Conditions

Bachelor project by Bart Postma, Best Bachelor Project Award 2009

Deferred shading is a relatively new shading technique and it has gained increasing attention the last few years. Yet, the information one reads about its performance is often incomplete or regards a specific application. The research presented here aims to fill a number of knowledge gaps that exists about deferred shading.

While deferred shading can give a significant performance increase, it can also give a significant performance decrease, depending. The performance is highly dependable on a number of conditions. This research presents how well deferred shading performs when these conditions change and how it scales. The tested conditions concern the number of lights, the type of lights, the illumination model, the complexity of the scene, and the influence range of lights. Furthermore, the obtained results are compared with the results of traditional shading.

You can download Bart Postma's bachelor thesis here. A demo application that demonstrates the performance of deferred and traditional shading under changing conditions can be downloaded as well (for Win32 or Linux, both include the sources).