SIGGRAPH 2009

SIGGRAPH is next week and I am still preparing my talk. If you are around please come by and say hi. My talks title is "Light Pre-Pass Renderer Mark III" and it is part of the "Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games" day on Monday next week:

http://www.siggraph.org/s2009/sessions/courses/details/?id=12

I collected all the new development in this area, and added a few new things I found out while working on DirectX 10 / 11 implementations and will post a link to the slides here. Especially on the PS3 there is lots of new and interesting development (Judging from the number of games that will ship with this approach I want to believe that it is the most popular way to apply lots of lights in games now). I received a first draft of an article for ShaderX8 / GPU Pro from Steven Tovey about how they implemented the Light Pre-Pass in the upcoming game Blur on the PS3. They based their approach on work done by Matt Swoboda. The results look very cool. You can check out the screenshots on their website.

There is lots of progress happening with the Oolong Engine for the iPhone / iPod Touch. Check out the change list on

http://code.google.com/p/oolongengine

We got OpenGL ES 2.0 running and there is a new tutorial series that looks really cool.

In other news somehow my name was mentioned on "The Escapist". Here is the link for your entertainment:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/publishers-note/6250-Publishers-Note-Made-By-People.2

MSAA on the PS3 with Light Pre-Pass on the SPU

In the previous "MSAA on the PS3" thread Matt Swoboda jumped in and mentioned that they implemented MSAA on the SPU in the Phyre Engine. I knew that they implemented the Light Pre-Pass on the SPU but I completely forgot that they also had a solution to do MSAA on the SPU.
You can find the presentation "Deferred Lighting and Post Processing on PLAYSTATION®" here.
Because it is possible to read and write per sample with the SPU, they can achieve a similar functionality as the per-sample frequency of DirectX 10.1-class graphics hardware where each sample can be treated separately. So they can calculate the lighting for each of the sample values and write the results into each of the samples in the light buffer.