i tried to post a reply to the old topic about this, but couldn't :( ... anyway, I'm asking about this famous (or infamous) problem in deferred shading. Is there a possible (& practical in performance-wise) solution to this problem? i'm using D3D9 atm. I saw 'deep deferred shading' demo on www.homus.ca, but it's saying it requires D3D10 ... hmmm ... btw, i know that the easiest solution would be to forward-render transparent objects after deferred shading, but i'd like to avoid that solution if possible.

I'm not aware of any method other than forward rendering and the "deep deferred" rendering method you mentioned from Humus. Is there a reason you absolutely must avoid forward rendering?

There's an interesting article in ShaderX6 about using a stencil routed k-buffer, but that too requires D3D10. The deep deferred rendering is also promising, but it does requires a lot of extra memory. For D3D9 I'm pretty sure you need to have a separate rendering path because nothing works directly in the deferred pipeline, and I think standard forward rendered alpha blending is gonna be the easiest way to go. Not sure why you need to avoid that, but there are a couple ways to do order independent transparency if thats why