Reverse engineering the rendering of a frame in Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Earlier this year, Adrian Courrèges wrote an article detailing his findings while reverse engineering the rendering pipeline in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Starting from a given frame, he illustrates the different stages in the rendering: creation of the G buffer, shadow map, ambient occlusion, light prepass, how opaque and transparent objects are treated differently, volumetric lights, bloom effect in LDR, anti-aliasing and color correction, the depth of field, and finally the object interaction visual feedback.

Here are a few screenshots stolen from his article:

Normal map

The light pre-pass

Final image

Update:
Adrian since then posted a new article, this time breaking down the rendering of a frame in Supreme Commander. The comments also include insights from the programmer then in charge of the rendering, Jon Mavor.

Series of articles on anti-aliasing

Matt Pettineo is writing an interesting and in-depth series of articles on anti-aliasing:

In this last article, he provides a list of captures comparing the results he obtained, as well as the source code.

On a side note, I like this short post of Timothy Lottes (well known for FXAA and TXAA) where he compares typical film image with typical video game one. His example of temporal aliasing is also worth keeping in mind.