GPU Pro 6

IV

Shadows

Shadows are the dark companions of lights, and although both can exist on their

own, they shouldn’t exist without each other in games. Achieving good visual

results in rendering shadows is considered one of the particularly difficult tasks

of graphics programmers.

The first article in the section, “Practical Screen-Space Soft Shadows” by

M´arton Tam´as and Viktor Heisenberger, describes how to implement a shadow

filter kernel in screen space while preserving the shadow color data in layers.

The next article, “Tile-Based Omnidirectional Shadows” by Hawar Doghra-

machi, shows how to implement efficient shadows in combination with a tiled de-

ferred ...