Deferred Shading in DirectX 10 (with Ambient Occlusion)

Deferred Shading is a rendering technique (in comparison to regular forward rendering) which has become popular over the last few years. Games like the upcoming Battlefield 3, Crysis 2 and numerous others use it, so I wanted to give it a try and implement a simple deferred renderer myself in DirectX 10.

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GitHub Repository and Visual Studio 2010 files:
GitHub Repository here
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Images for all the render targets/textures (Diffuse, Normals, Depth, Ambient Occlusion, Composite with Ambient Occlusion, Composite without AO):

Diffuse Texture

View-space Normals

Depth Texture

Ambient Occlusion

Composite with Ambient Occlusion

Composite without AO

What is Deferred Shading?

If you are reading this chances are you already know what deferred shading is and how it works, so I won’t go into too much detail. Wikipedia has a good overview and there are other places which can describe it better.

Basically deferred shading involves rendering your view-space normals, your depth-buffer, specular/diffuse, ambient occlusion, etc. values into different textures and then using them at a later pass to create a final composite image (by rendering a full-screen quad). There are several advantages and some disadvantages (increased memory bandwidth due to multiple render targets, inability to handle transparency, anti-aliasing, etc.)

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