Deferred lighting: a computation-efficient approach for real-time 3-D graphics

Real-time 3-D graphics emerges rapidly in multimedia applications, but suffers from huge computation requirement. In 3-D graphics, lighting is an essential operation, but requires high computation power. In fact, many lighting calculations are redundant due to invisible polygons. To explore computation efficiency, we propose a novel deferred lighting approach. This approach defers lighting calculation after visibility comparison, hence eliminates lighting calculation on invisible polygon. Simulation result shows that deferred lighting approach can save 22%-58% of lighting calculation in flat shading and Gouraud shading, and initial cost of Taylor series in fast Phong shading