Implementing efficient virtual shadow maps for many lights

In the past few years, several techniques have been presented that enable real-time shading using many hundreds or thousands of lights [Harada et al. 2013]. However, only recently has a comprehensive study including shadows been presented by Olsson et al. [2014], where real-time performance is achieved for several hundred light sources with high quality and controllable memory footprint. The new algorithm uses many modern features of OpenGL and contains many design choices only described very briefly in the paper. We present additional details and focus on the practical implementation aspects of the system, in order to facilitate the implementation of the algorithm for the game development community.