The Early History of Deferred Shading and Lighting

We didn't realize it, but Shrek Xbox was the first deferred shaded game. A while after shipping Shrek, and before this talk, I had already spent around a year contracting for Microsoft's ATG (Advanced Technology Group - the team behind Xbox) researching deferred rendering on ATI's early prototype shader model 2.0 hardware, so I was extremely confident this approach to rendering scenes was the right path forward. Rewind to A Bit of Deferred Shading History, Way Back in 2001 If it wasn't for Atman I wouldn't have started down this path in the first place. Atman originally suggested that we try deferred shading, and without his very deep math skills there's no way I could have gotten omnidirectional lights to work efficiently on the original Xbox's groundbreakingly powerful (for the time) but constraining NVidia GPU. At the time Atman suggested it, I already had a bunch of real-time rendering experience after writing the software and Direct3D 7 renderers and 3DS Max exporters for an ann ... Read full article.