www.design-reuse-embedded.com
Find Top SoC Solutions
for AI, Automotive, IoT, Security, Audio & Video...

Implementing fast, ray traced soft shadows in a game engine

By Alexandru Voica - Imagination Blog, Jul. 21, 2015 – 

About a year ago I published an article on Gamasutra called Practical techniques for ray tracing in games which explained how developers can implement a series of hybrid rendering techniques on PowerVR GR6500 (our ray tracing-capable GPU) to achieve some pretty impressive effects.

Even though the target applications for ray tracing are extremely varied, this post is focused mainly on shadows. Not only does ray tracing create more accurate shadows that are free from the artifacts of shadow maps, but ray traced shadows are also up to twice as efficient; they can be generated at comparable or better quality in half the GPU cycles and with half the memory traffic (more on that later).

In what follows below, I'd like to take you through the process of implementing an efficient technique for soft shadows.

Cascaded shadow maps in traditional rasterized graphics

Firstly, let's review cascaded shadow maps - the state of the art technique used today to generate shadows for rasterized graphics. The idea behind cascaded shadow maps is to take the view frustrum, divide it up in a number of regions based on distance from the viewpoint, and render a shadow map for each region. This will offer variable resolution for shadow maps: the objects that are closer to the camera will get higher resolution, while the objects that fall off into the distance will get lower resolution per unit area.


Click here to read more...

 Back

Partner with us

List your Products

Suppliers, list and add your products for free.

More about D&R Privacy Policy

© 2024 Design And Reuse

All Rights Reserved.

No portion of this site may be copied, retransmitted, reposted, duplicated or otherwise used without the express written permission of Design And Reuse.