What if?

[blakegriplingph]

Well, from what I've observed TS3 seems to make use of a forward-style renderer. What if the game used deferred rendering? Would that make lighting better ingame?

[r_deNoube]

Well, from what I've observed TS3 seems to make use of a forward-style renderer. What if the game used deferred rendering? Would that make lighting better ingame?
I have heard of deferred rendering, or deferred shading, usually as a way to improve performance (because you don't have to redraw the same patch of surface for every light source that reaches it), but not necessarily the quality. Doesn't the lighting equation have to be the same for all surface materials? I guess I'd worry that the buffer, that needs to store all the information about the surface that you'll use when you go to render it, might be designed by someone at the graphics-card company who values race-cars and machine-guns and (especially) rendering speed -- but not so much hair, rough cloth, reflections from eyes, etc., if getting those right would cost a lot of RAM.