Clustered Deferred and Forward Shading

Paper in proceeding, 2012

This paper presents and investigates Clustered Shading for deferred and forward rendering. In Clustered Shading, view samples with similar properties (e.g. 3D-position and/or normal) are grouped into clusters. This is comparable to tiled shading, where view samples are grouped into tiles based on 2D-position only. We show that Clustered Shading creates a better mapping of light sources to view samples than tiled shading, resulting in a significant reduction of lighting computations during shading. Additionally, Clustered Shading enables using normal information to perform per-cluster back-face culling of lights, again reducing the number of lighting computations. We also show that Clustered Shading not only outperforms tiled shading in many scenes, but also exhibits better worst case behaviour under tricky conditions (e.g. when looking at high-frequency geometry with large discontinuities in depth). Additionally, Clustered Shading enables real-time scenes with two to three orders of magnitudes more lights than previously feasible (up to around one million light sources).