Deferred renderer

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Deferred lighting is an alternate lighting technique, which is much different from the default Radiosity lighting that comes with Source. It uses many different lighting passes to generate higher quality lighting, with real time shadows.

Availability

Very few Source games utilize this lighting technique, as it is very complicated to implement, the games that do use this are listed here:

• Alien Swarm Deferred
• Black Mesa
• Hammer (Lighting Preview in Stock HL2 and Strata Source)

Differences from stock Source radiosity

When compiling a map in any of Valve's games, each map is run through VRAD, which takes data from all the light sources and compile them into a "lightmap" texture. While this does provide high-quality and variable lighting, it is completely static, save for the limited ability to toggle on some lights in a scene. The difference between radiosity and Deferred lighting is that Deferred lighting computes all its lights in real time. The game takes data from the normals of the object, its geometry, its albedo, and its specular lighting to create real time accurate lighting.

Todo: Downsides

External Links

•  Deferred lighting on Wkipedia
• Deferred Shading on LearnOpenGL (same basic principals apply)