Surface caching

Surface caching is a computer graphics technique pioneered by John Carmack, first used in the computer game Quake. The traditional method of lighting a surface is to calculate the surface from the perspective of the viewer, and then apply the lighting to the surface. Carmack's technique was to light the surface independent of the viewer, and store that surface in a cache. The lighted surface could then be used in the normal rendering pipeline for any number of frames.

Surface caching is one of the reasons that it became practical to make a true 3D game that was reasonably fast on a 66Mhz Pentium microprocessor.

External Links

• In-Depth Explanation by Michael Abrash (http://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/chap68.shtml)
• Google Search of "surface caching" (http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=surface+caching)