Figure 1: Decoupled deferred shading enables efficient shading reuse for stochastic rasterization. These images show depth of field rendering with 4× visibility supersampling (left), a visualization of the shading rate (sspp-shading samples per pixel, center), and the same shading as seen from a pin-hole camera (right). Our adaptive scheme reduces the shading frequency of defocused regions.
AbstractIn 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.