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This is somewhat of an incomplete analsysis, because you can use light tiling with either forward and deferred. And that's pretty common nowadays. The real adva

This is somewhat of an incomplete analsysis, because you can use light tiling with either forward and deferred. And that's pretty common nowadays. The real advantage to deferred is to save on quad overshading and balance the use of the GPUs. By making lighting homogeneous across the scene you'll have a lot better utilization of the GPU's resources, since there's no wasted pixel effort during the expensive lighting loop. Downside is of course transparency and the need to dump your full material model into a G buffer...

ninepoints 5y ago
Hey author here :) I actually deliberately kept the tiled lighting section hopefully devoid of any consideration for deferred vs forward since as you say we can (and do) do tiled light culling with both algorithms. Quad overshading and the use of "helper lanes" is worth mentioning in the article maybe as a footnote. It certainly is another way in which the GPU's silicon can be underutilized, but I'd hesitate to say it is the "main reason" for deferred so much as "one of the reasons". I definitely struggled to walk the balance between summarizing the concerns at a coarse level, vs providing all the gory details. So to your point, definitely wasn't comprehensive, there's RTR4 for that :). "... for young bloods" is in the title after all
- codefreakxff 5y ago
  Sweet. I made an engine to learn OpenGL 2.0 and vertex shaders way back when, but moved on to other things in life. A couple of weeks ago I was curious what’s changed with the latest pipeline techniques. This feels like it will be a great way for me to catch up. Thanks for writing this!
  - ninepoints 5y ago
    Awesome! Note that there are better writeups for learning the specific implementation details for any given technique, and this article was mainly written to give people a rough “mental model” when assessing a whitepaper or siggraph talk or something. If I have time I’ll go back and add a section with references to the core techniques I see in use today.

ninepoints 5y ago

Hey author here :) I actually deliberately kept the tiled lighting section hopefully devoid of any consideration for deferred vs forward since as you say we can (and do) do tiled light culling with both algorithms. Quad overshading and the use of "helper lanes" is worth mentioning in the article maybe as a footnote. It certainly is another way in which the GPU's silicon can be underutilized, but I'd hesitate to say it is the "main reason" for deferred so much as "one of the reasons". I definitely struggled to walk the balance between summarizing the concerns at a coarse level, vs providing all the gory details. So to your point, definitely wasn't comprehensive, there's RTR4 for that :). "... for young bloods" is in the title after all

codefreakxff 5y ago
Sweet. I made an engine to learn OpenGL 2.0 and vertex shaders way back when, but moved on to other things in life. A couple of weeks ago I was curious what’s changed with the latest pipeline techniques. This feels like it will be a great way for me to catch up. Thanks for writing this!
- ninepoints 5y ago
  Awesome! Note that there are better writeups for learning the specific implementation details for any given technique, and this article was mainly written to give people a rough “mental model” when assessing a whitepaper or siggraph talk or something. If I have time I’ll go back and add a section with references to the core techniques I see in use today.