Rendering Many Lights with Clustered Deferred Rendering
Until now, our scene has been lit by a single point light. While this has worked fine so far as we focused our attention more on laying the foundations of our rendering engine, it’s not a very compelling and realistic use case. Modern games can have hundreds of lights in a given scene, and it’s important that the lighting stage is performed efficiently and within the budget of a frame.
In this chapter, we will first describe the most common techniques that are used both in deferred and forward shading. We will highlight the pros and cons of each technique so that you can determine which one best fits your needs.
Next, we are going to provide an overview of our G-buffer setup. While the G-buffer has been in place from the very beginning, we haven’t covered its implementation in detail. This is a good time to go into more detail, as the choice of a deferred renderer will inform our strategy for clustered...
