Hybrid Lighting for faster rendering of scenes with many lights

Abstract

There is growing interest in rendering scenes with many lights, where scenes typically contain hundreds to thousands of lights. Each light illuminates geometry within a finite extent called a light volume. A key aspect of performance is determining which lights apply to what geometry, and then applying those lights efficiently. We present a GPU-based approach using spatial data structures, binning lights by depth analytically while also taking advantage of hardware rasterization. This improves light binning performance by 3–6 $$\times $$ . We also present a GPU memory and cache friendly data structure that takes two passes to build, giving 4–10 $$\times $$ improved performance when applying lighting and an overall improvement of 1.3–4 $$\times $$ for total frametime.