Abstract

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. In 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 vis-ibility. This enables caching and efficient reuse of shading com-putation, e.g. for stochastic rasterization techniques. In contrast to previous methods, our decoupled shading can be efficiently im-plemented on current graphics hardware. We describe two vari-ants which differ in the way the shading samples are cached: the first maintains a single cache for the entire image in global mem-ory, while the second pursues a tile-based approach leveraging local memory of the GPU’s multiprocessors. We demonstrate the appli-cation of decoupled deferred shading to speed up the rendering in applications with stochastic supersampling, depth of field, and mo-tion blur.