Forward+: Bringing Deferred Lighting to the Next Level

Abstract

This paper presents Forward+, a method of rendering many lights by culling and storing only lights that contribute to the pixel. Forward+ is an extension to traditional forward rendering. Light culling, implemented using the compute capability of the GPU, is added to the pipeline to create lists of lights; that list is passed to the final rendering shader, which can access all information about the lights. Although Forward+ increases workload to the final shader, it theoretically requires less memory traffic compared to compute-based deferred lighting. Furthermore, it removes the major drawback of deferred techniques, which is a restriction of materials and lighting models. Experiments are performed to compare the performance of Forward+ and deferred lighting.