I’m a bit confused by why some sources say that Deferred Rendering has more performance, and others say that Forward Rendering is the one that gives better performance.
From the sources, if I understand correctly, Forward Shading is better for lower end games because it uses less VRAM, but it’s slower and takes more resources during the initial loading?
Source 1
forward rendering or forward shading: While quite easy to understand and implement it is also quite heavy on performance as each rendered object has to iterate over each light source for every rendered fragment, which is a lot! Forward rendering also tends to waste a lot of fragment shader runs in scenes with a high depth complexity (multiple objects cover the same screen pixel) as fragment shader outputs are overwritten.
Deferred shading or deferred rendering aims to overcome these issues by drastically
Source 2
Forward Rendering provides a faster baseline, with faster rendering passes, which may lead to better performance
Source 3
Forward: This approach gets rid of the G-Buffer, saving GPU memory and making several thing easier (especially anti-aliasing). Don’t be suprised, though, that the cost of the base pass is significantly higher with forward.