Deep Partitioned Shadow Volumes Using Stackless and Hybrid Traversals

International audienceAccurate hard shadows is a difficult problem in interactive rendering. Previous methods rely either on Shadow Maps or Shadow Volumes. Recently Partitioned Shadow Volumes (PSV) has been introduced. It revisits the old Shadow Volumes Binary Tree Space Partitioning algorithm, leading to a practicable and efficient technique. In this article, we analyze the PSV query algo- rithm and identify two main drawbacks: First, it uses a stack which is not GPU friendly; its size must be small enough to reduce the register pressure, but large enough to avoid stack overflow. Second, PSV struggles with configurations involving significant depth complexity, especially for lit points. We solve these problems by adding a depth information to the PSV data structure, and by designing a stackless query. In addition, we show how to combine the former PSV query to our stackless solution, leading to a hybrid technique taking advantage of both. While any risk of stack overflow is eliminated, our experiments demonstrate that these improvements accelerate the rendering time up to a factor of 3