r/GraphicsProgramming • u/Wittyname_McDingus • 22h ago

Article Virtual Shadow Maps (GPU Zen 3)

https://graphics-programming.org/blog/virtual-shadow-maps
45 Upvotes

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21

u/Wittyname_McDingus 21h ago

This was an article that I contributed to a few years back, and I finally took the time to convert it to a format fit for the blog. Now everyone can read it for free.

Hopefully someone finds it insightful.

P.S. I was inspired to post this by the recent post about VSMs :D

2

u/ExpeditionZero 20h ago

Thanks for this - looks good.

2

u/UnalignedAxis111 12h ago

I implemented VSMs a month ago with help of the older articles by you guys and am quite pleased with it. Even without the virtual allocation scheme you can get very good quality and performance for not that much extra effort, some tricky details ofc but still very much worth it. 2048x2048 cascades at 4 base distance looks probably better than a lot of CSMs implementations out there lol.

Main complication is that it needs a very good culling scheme and even then you might have bigger triangles spanning outside the affected pages, though I suspect a faster way to render pages which should mitigate this might be raster-ordered views or maybe deferring the page wrapping to a separate pass rather than doing it in the frag shader, as that won't disable early-depth or compression.