GPU Pro 6

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VI

Compute-Based Tiled Culling

Jason Stewart

1.1 Introduction

Modern real-time rendering engines need to support many dynamic light sources

in a scene. Meeting this requirement with traditional forward rendering is prob-

lematic. Typically, a forward-rendered engine culls lights on the CPU for each

batch of scene geometry to be drawn, and changing the set of lights in use requires

a separate draw call. Thus, there is an undesirable tradeoff between using smaller

pieces of the scene for more efficient light culling versus using larger batches and

more instancing for fewer total draw calls. The intersection tests required for

light culling can also be a