Decoupled Deferred Shading for Hardware Rasterization

In this paper we present decoupled deferred shading: a rendering technique based on a new data structure called compact geometry buffer, which stores shading samples independently from the visibility. This enables caching and efficient reuse of shading computation, e.g. for stochastic rasterization techniques. In contrast to previous methods, our decoupled shading can be efficiently implemented on current graphics hardware. We describe two variants which differ in the way the shading samples are cached: the first maintains a single cache for the entire image in global memory, while the second pursues a tile-based approach leveraging local memory of the GPU’s multiprocessors. We demonstrate the application of decoupled deferred shading to speed up the rendering in applications with stochastic supersampling, depth of field, and motion blur.

@inproceedings{Liktor:2012:DDS:2159616.2159640,
 author = {Liktor, G\'{a}bor and Dachsbacher, Carsten},
 title = {Decoupled deferred shading for hardware rasterization},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games},
 series = {I3D '12},
 year = {2012},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-1194-6},
 location = {Costa Mesa, California},
 pages = {143--150},
 numpages = {8},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2159616.2159640},
 doi = {10.1145/2159616.2159640},
 acmid = {2159640},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {decoupled sampling, deferred shading, stochastic rasterization},
}