Tiled Shading

Abstract

In this article we describe and investigate Tiled Shading. The tiled techniques, though simple, enable substantial improvements to both deferred and forward shading. Tiled Shading has previously been talked about only in terms of deferred shading (Tiled Deferred Shading). We contribute a more detailed description of the technique, introduce Tiled Forward Shading (a generalization of Tiled Deferred Shading to also apply to forward shading), and a thorough performance evaluation. Tiled Forward Shading has many of the advantages of deferred shading, e.g. scene management and light management is decoupled. At the same time, unlike traditional deferred and tiled deferred shading, Full Screen Anti Aliasing and transparency is trivially supported. We also contribute a thorough comparison of the performance of Tiled Deferred, Tiled Forward and traditional deferred shading. Our evaluation shows that Tiled Deferred Shading has the least variable worst case performance, and scales the best with faster GPUs. Tiled Deferred Shading is especially suitable when there are many light sources. Tiled Forward Shading is shown to be competitive for scenes with fewer lights, while being much simpler than traditional forward shading techniques. Tiled shading also enables simple transitioning between deferred and forward shading. We demonstrate how this can be used to handle transparent geometry, frequently a problem when using deferred shading.

Efficient virtual shadow maps for many lights

“…Real Time Many Light Shading Tiled Shading is a recent technique that supports many thousands of lights in real-time applications [Swoboda 2009;Olsson and Assarsson 2011;Harada 2012]. In this technique, lights are binned into 2D screen-space tiles that can then be queried for shading.…”

“…These techniques work by binning lights into tiles of various dimensionality [Olsson and Assarsson 2011;Harada 2012;Olsson et al 2012]. Many simultaneous lights enable both a higher degree of visual quality and greater artistic freedom, and these techniques are therefore directly applicable in the games industry [Swoboda 2009;Ferrier and Coffin 2011;Persson and Olsson 2013].…”

More Efficient Virtual Shadow Maps for Many Lights

“…II. PREVIOUS WORK a) Real Time Many Light Shading: Tiled Shading is a recent technique that supports many thousands of lights in real-time applications [4], [1], [2]. In this technique, lights are binned into 2D screen-space tiles that can then be queried for shading.…”

“…1) Batch Hierarchy Construction: Each batch is a range of triangle indices and an AABB, constructed such that all the vertices share the transformation matrix 1 and are located close together, to ensure coherency under animation. The batches are created off-line, using a bottom-up agglomerative treeconstruction algorithm over the scene triangles, similar to that described by Walter et al [24].…”

“…These techniques work by binning lights into low-dimensional tiles, which enables coherent and sequential access to lights in the shaders [1], [2], [3]. The ability to use many simultaneous lights enables both a higher degree of visual quality and greater artistic freedom, and these techniques are therefore directly applicable in the games industry [4], [5], [6].…”