Abstract: The primary advantage of deferred shading is eliminating wasted shading operations for fragments that are occluded by others during rendering. Deferred shading starts by rendering the entire scene into a series of temporary buffers (a geometry buffer or G-buffer). Then, it performs the shading operations using the contents of these buffers. Hence, deferred shading executes the (potentially expensive) fragment shader exactly once for a given pixel sample, avoiding additional fragment shading invocations due to overdrawing. Although deferred shading requires an extra pass and significant memory overhead to store the G-buffer, it can still be beneficial to performance when fragment shading is sufficiently expensive.