Tiled Forward Shading

Book chapter, 2013

We will explore the tiled forward shading algorithm in this chapter. Tiled forward shading is an extension or modification of tiled deferred shad- ing [Balestra and Engstad 08,Swoboda 09,Andersson 09,Lauritzen 10,Olsson and Assarsson 11], which itself improves upon traditional deferred shading methods [Hargreaves and Harris 04, Engel 09]. Tiled forward rendering attempts to combine one of the main advantages of (tiled) deferred rendering, i.e. the reduced amount of lighting computations done, with the advantages of forward rendering. Besides reduced memory requirements (forward rendering does not need the large G-buffer), it also enables transparency [Kircher and Lawrance 09, Enderton et al. 10], multi-sampling schemes [Swoboda 09,Lauritzen 10] and does not force the use of ubershaders if different shading models must be supported.