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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 is to light the surface independent of the viewer, and store that surface in a cache. The lighted surface can 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 66 MHz Pentium microprocessor.
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