Deferred rendering using Compute shaders

Abstract: Game developers today are putting a lot of effort into their games. Consumers are hard to please and demand a game which can provide both fun and visual quality. This is why developers aim to make the most use of what hardware resources are available to them to achieve the best possible quality of the game. It is easy to use too many performance demanding techniques in a game, making the game unplayable. The hard part is to make the game look good without decreasing the performance. This can be done by using techniques in a smart way to make the graphics as smooth and efficient as they can be without compromising the visual quality. One of these techniques is deferred rendering. The latest version of Microsoft’s graphics platform, DirectX 11, comes with several new features. One of these is the Compute shader which is a feature making it easier to execute general computation on the graphics card. Developers do not need to use DirectX 11 cards to be able to use this feature though. Microsoft has made it available on graphic cards made for DirectX 10 as well. There are however a few differences between the two versions. The focus of this report will be to investigate the possible performance differences between these versions on when using deferred rendering. An application was made supporting both shader model 4 and 5 of the compute shader, to be able to investigate this.