Deferred Adaptive Compute Shading

Abstract

A primary advantage of deferred shading is eliminating wasted shading operations due to overdraw. We present a new algorithm that we call Deferred Adaptive Compute Shading, for providing further reduction in shading computations. Our method hierarchically shades the image while reducing the number of required shading operations to below one shading computation per pixel on average. We determine whether to shade a pixel or approximate it using previously shaded pixels around it, based on an estimate of the image variance at the pixel location. The algorithm is designed to dynamically reconfigure itself to achieve optimal warp coherence and measurable performance gain. We extensively evaluate our algorithm, demonstrating that it produces high-quality results and is robust and highly scalable while providing significant performance improvements in complex scenes.