Multi-Threaded Shadow Volumes on Mainstream Graphics Hardware

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	June 19, 2009 1:00 AM PDT

Introduction

This white paper describes techniques to generate shadows on mainstream graphics hardware in realtime. Shadows make a 3D scene more realistic and while Shadow Maps suffer from anti-aliasing artifacts due to low-precision textures, Shadow Volumes avoid this problem by creating physically accurate shadows. However, if there are many dynamic shadow-generating objects or if there are a lot of moving light sources, this technique could severely affect performance. This paper describes how shadow volumes generated on the CPU using a multithreaded approach could free up the graphics hardware from this bottleneck-creating task.

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Multi-Threaded Shadow Volumes on Mainstream Graphics Hardware [PDF 149KB]

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Multi-Threaded Shadow Volumes on IIG [ZIP 373KB]

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