GPU Gems 3

Chapter 2. Animated Crowd Rendering

Bryan Dudash NVIDIA Corporation

With game rendering becoming more complex, both visually and computationally, it is important to make efficient use of GPU hardware. Using instancing, you can reduce CPU overhead by reducing the number of draw calls, state changes, and buffer updates. This chapter shows how to use DirectX 10 instancing with vertex texture fetches to implement instanced hardware palette-skinned characters. The sample also makes use of constant buffers, and the SV_InstanceID system variable to efficiently implement the technique. With this technique, we are able to realize almost 10,000 characters, independently animating with different animations and differing meshes at 30 frames/sec on an Intel ...