Deferred Lighting / Particle System

Here is a shot of a GPU based particle system with lights attached to each particle. I used Emil Persson's example Deferred Shading program as a basis to implement a Light Pre-Pass renderer with 4k lights and 4k particles. It runs fairly well on a GeForce 9600 GT here:

Light Pre-Pass: Knee-Deep

Several companies adopted the Light Pre-Pass idea, modified it or came up with similar ideas:

• Crytek: they call it Deferred lighting contrary to Deferred shading. The technique is mentioned in the new Cry Engine 3 presentation here
• Garagegames in their new Torque 3D engine currently in beta. Read the article from Pat Wilson in ShaderX7 and the garagegames website
• Insomniac came up with a Pre-lighting approach that is similar to this. See Mark Lee's presentation from GDC 2009 here
• DICE is using it since a long time already
• I believe EA used it in Dead Space :-)
• Carsten Dachsbacher described a similar idea in his article "Splatting of Indirect Illumination" here and in ShaderX5

One of the interesting areas in this context is the ability to implement a one-bounce global illumination effect with the data in the G-Buffer and the light buffer ...