What is it?
Deferred Rendering (also commonly and falsely known in Second Life as Advanced Lighting Model) and correctly labeled 'Deferred Shading' is a commonly used rendering technique which moves the actual shading to the second pass of vertex and pixel shaders, while the first is solely used to gather relevant information that will be used in the second pass to calculate lighting and shading. It's biggest advantage is decoupling the lighting from the geometry pass which allows rendering a lot lights for instance without a big performance impact compared to the normal rendering approach. Generally Deferred Rendering should always be enabled, it should only improve performance if anything, most modern hardware will actually see a performance hit when disabling Deferred Rendering. Deferred Rendering is also the foundation for other advanced rendering features such as Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field and rendering shadows.
How does it look?
The difference, aside from an overall brighter image lies in the details here, these walls have normal and specular maps, with Deferred Rendering enabled they become visible, you can also see the metallic reflection a bit better as it is now correcty reflecting light, although keep in mind that this is without shadows and most of this should not receive any direct sunlight. Overall it is a slight improvement over Legacy Rendering and only the foundation of all other features.
How can i use it?
You can enable Deferred Rendering by opening 'Preferences' and selecting the 'Display' tab, here you will find a checkbox in one of the major tabs labeled 'Deferred Rendering'.
What can i change?
Without any additional features enabled Deferred remains mostly static, you'll find all of its options in the 'Deferred Rendering' section of 'Display' settings, those include Antialiasing, a bunch of light options and whether you want light to be smoothened or not.
Caveats
Deferred Rendering will add a bit more texture memory usage on top of the possibly already very limited amount you've got, keep that in mind.
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