The Riftbreaker to Get Free Performance Boost Thanks to Tiled Deferred Shading

wccftech.com:

The Riftbreaker, the action strategy game released in late 2021 on PC and consoles, will soon get a free performance boost, as announced by Polish developer EXOR Studios in a blog post published on Steam.

The small development studio originally developed its engine from open source software like the OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine, available to this day under the MIT license). Over time, EXOR had modified it enough to make it its own thing: the Schmetterling engine.

For the studio's first game, the top-down racing title Zombie Driver (2012), EXOR used forward rendering. However, forward rendering essentially limited the developers to a single dynamic light due to how complex it would be to add any more than that.

In the twin-stick shooter/tower defense game X-Morph: Defense (2019) and The Riftbreaker, the developers moved to deferred shading. This screen-space technique brings a major advantage over forward rendering in that the geometry of the scene and the lighting are rendered separately, and each light is only calculated for those pixels that are actually affected by the light. Deferred shading allowed a greater number of dynamic lights into gaming scenes, becoming very popular from 2010 onward, though it has limitations of its own.

Deferred shading doesn't scale all that well when the scene has a high amount of dynamic lights, and it also cannot store transparent objects information in its G-Buffer, which means non-opaque objects cannot be taken into account for lighting.

That's why EXOR is introducing a rendering upgrade to The Riftbreaker: Tiled Deferred Shading. With this algorithm, the screen is divided into 16x16 pixels tiles, and each tile stores information on the lights that affect it. This is