Homogeneous coordinate rings as direct summands of regular rings

We study the question of when a ring can be realized as a direct summand of a regular ring by examining the case of homogeneous coordinate rings. We present very strong obstacles to expressing a graded ring with isolated singularity as a finite graded direct summand. For several classes of examples (del Pezzo surfaces, hypersurfaces), we give a complete classification of which coordinate rings can be expressed as direct summands (not necessarily finite), and in doing so answer a question of Hara about the FFRT property of the quintic del Pezzo. We also examine what happens in the case where the ring does not have isolated singularities, through topological arguments: as an example, we give a classification of which coordinate rings of singular cubic surfaces can be written as finite direct summands of regular rings.