POWERVR Insider MRT Deferred Shading Demo

Traditional rendering algorithms submit geometry and immediately apply shading effects to the rasterised primitives. Complex shading effects often require multiple render passes to produce the final pixel colour, with the geometry submitted every pass. Deferred shading (a.k.a. Quad Shading) is an alternative rendering technique that submits the scene geometry only once, storing per-pixel attributes into local video memory to be used in the subsequent rendering passes.

The storage requirements for these attributes exceed the buffer space offered by a normal colour buffer; for this reason Multiple Render Target (MRT) functionality is used. MRTs allow the pixel shader to store results in multiple buffers at the same time, massively increasing the amount of output storage. In later passes, screen-aligned quads are rendered and the per-pixel attributes contained in the buffer are retrieved at a 1:1 mapping ratio so that each pixel is shaded individually. The POWERVR SGX family allows the usage of on-chip MRT buffers resulting in minimal usage of power and performance costly off-chip bandwidth and storage requirements.

Right click the download link below and 'Select Save target as ...' to download the demo to your computer. To play the file you need a suitable media player, e.g. Windows Media player.

 Download MRT Deferred Shading Demo