by Evan Todd
Support for Multiple Render Targets and Shader Model 2
Mono, MonoDevelop, and OpenTK.
Visual Studio and OpenTK.
Download OpenTK from here.
Spacebar - Toggle display mode
This sample demonstrates a very basic deferred renderer. While a forward renderer normally calculates lighting as it renders the scene, a deferred renderer saves information about the materials in the scene to a number of buffers. These are later sampled to calculate the lighting, and then composited into a final image. There are many advantages to the technique, but probably the most useful feature is its ability to render large amounts of lights at relatively low cost, irrespective of the triangular complexity of the scene.
This sample renders a simple textured cube with 100 deferred point lights. Press spacebar to view the buffers used to generate the scene. The buffers are (clockwise from the top left): normals, light accumulation, depth, and diffuse.
The renderer is greatly simplified in the interest of time. Real high dynamic range is essential for a real deferred renderer. This sample simulates it by storing scaled values in the lighting buffer.
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