This is in contrast to other popular methods of lighting such as vertex lighting, which calculates illumination at each vertex of a 3D model and then interpolates the resulting values over the model's faces to calculate the final per-pixel color values.
Deferred shading is a recent development in per-pixel lighting notable for its use in the Frostbite Engine and Battlefield 3.
[3] Blinn pointed out that the earlier idea of unlit texture mapping proposed by Edwin Catmull was unrealistic for simulating rough surfaces.
Real-time applications, such as video games, usually implement per-pixel lighting through the use of pixel shaders, allowing the GPU hardware to process the effect.
NVidia's mental ray rendering software, which is integrated with such suites as Autodesk's Softimage is a well-known example.