Horde3D

I thought you guys might be interested in this:

It's a hybrid lighting model that tries to gain the benefits of deferred-lighting while still using forward-shading to draw the geometry (no G-buffer).

Light Indexed Deferred Rendering

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=480639
http://code.google.com/p/lightindexed-deferredrender/

I read through the paper very quickly. As with each new technique there are probably also still some problems which need to be solved but in general it is a very interesing approach.

Here's another hybrid deferred/forward shading approach if anyone's interested

This one should work on a lot more hardware than most MRT based solutions.

It does a geometry pass storing normals and depths into a "G-Buffer" (not really a g-buffer...).
Then for each light, it uses the g-buffer and the lights properties to accumulate all light sources into a light-buffer (kinda like merging all lights into a single 'average light').

Then it does a forward shading pass on the geometry, taking the light properties from the light-buffer.

Light Pre-Pass Renderer
http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogs ... derer.html
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=487154

That one looks like it would be simpler to implement than the Light Indexed method.