Efficient Real-Time Shading with Many Lights

Abstract

Using many lights in real-time applications has been an important goal for many years. The games industry in particular has strived to increase the number of lights to provide enhanced visual quality and realism. Today, high-end games often make use of hundreds of lights in each frame, and this is likely to be pushed further in the future. The ability to efficiently manage and shade large numbers of lights brings many possibilities, apart from simply allowing light to be cast from many dynamic objects. In addition, it can support visualizing global illumination solutions, or enable detailed artistic light direction. Thus, efficient real-time shading with many lights, represents a potential for solving many of the problems facing the development of next generation high-end games. To achieve the level of performance needed to make this possible, the way which light management and shading is performed has undergone dramatically development in recent years. Both industry and academia has invested great effort pursuing this goal, which has resulted in a large number of new and sometimes competing techniques. This course presents an in-depth exploration of this topic, starting with background and leading up to state of the art research, including recent results on supporting shadows. The course combines production experience from game developers with the latest research into efficient many-light algorithms for both desktop and mobile hardware.