Paper: Multi-Threaded Shadow Volumes on Mainstream Graphics Hardware
The Intel Software Network has posted "Multi-Threaded Shadow Volumes on Mainstream Graphics Hardware," a white paper from software engineer David Bookout and Intel senior applications engineer Satheesh Subramanian, which describes techniques for generating shadows on mainstream graphics hardware in realtime.
The paper notes that though shadow volumes are able to create physically accurate shadows, thus providing a more realistic 3D scene, having an abundance of dynamic shadow-generating objects or moving light sources can affect performance.
To combat that problem, the paper covers "how shadow volumes generated on the CPU using a multithreaded approach could free up the graphics hardware from this bottleneck-creating task."
The paper also provides a shadow maps implementation based on the EmptyProject example from the Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK.
