Rendering
From Esenthel
Esenthel Engine supports following methods of rendering:
- Simple
- Forward
- Deferred
Contents |
Simple
This renderer should be used only for low performance video cards.
Advantages:
- Fastest
- Can support hardware anti-aliasing (multi-sampling)
Disadvantages:
- Only one light (directional) is supported with no shadows
- Does not support any bump mapping (not even normal mapping) or specular highlights
Forward
In this renderer, lighting and shadowing is performed during rendering of each object, which means that each object must be rendered for each light separately. This is ok for low number of lights (perfectly 1 directional light only), but gets slower for more lights.
Targeted for medium performance video cards.
Advantages:
- Faster for simple scenes with low number of lights (perfectly only one directional light)
- Can support hardware anti-aliasing (multi-sampling)
Disadvantages:
- On video cards with Shader Model 2.0 only stencil shadows are supported
- Slower for more complex scenes with big amount of lights
- Does not support advanced bump mapping (parallax and relief mapping)
- Does not support shadow softing through D.shdSoft
Deferred
This renderer first displays objects into few render targets (by storing their color value, world space position, surface normal and other parameters) without any lighting.
Once all objects are rendered, lighting is applied to the screen basing on the results stored in render targets.
Base speed of this renderer is slower when compared to Forward rendering (because of additional bandwidth required to setup render targets), however it works faster for more complex scenes.
Targeted for high performance video cards.
Advantages:
- Faster for more complex scenes
- Enables all effects
- Allows shadow mapping even on Shader Model 2.0 video cards
- Applying lights with no shadows is very fast
Disadvantages:
- Slower for simple scenes
- Hardware anti-aliasing (multi-sampling) is available only on Shader Model 4.1 or newer
Simple and Forward renderer special effects limitations
Some of the effects are unavailable, which include:
- Advanced Water
- Fur Effect
- Ambient Occlusion
Some of the effects are available only for video cards supporting depth-texture (GeForce 6 and Radeon x1000 or newer) :
- Particles Softing
- Global Fog
- Local Fog
- Smooth Sky Blending with Horizon (Sky Fog)
- Smooth Cloud Blending with Horizon
- Simple Motion Blur
- Depth of Field
- Decals
- Sun Rays
- Edge Detection
- Volumetric Lighting
Hardware anti-aliasing (multi-sampling) for Shader Model 4.0 or older disables:
- Usage of depth-texture which disables all effects described in upper paragraph
- Rendering in RM_PALETTE mode
Deferred rendering is preferred.
