Kyle Hayward, a Purdue University senior studying graphics research who we've featured before, posted a useful primer to dual-paraboloid reflections, which he describes as a "view-independent method of rendering reflections just like cubemaps."

Unlike cubemaps, which can require updating up to six textures when rendering dynamic scenes, dual-paraboloid reflections only require updating two textures.

Hawyard comments: "They won't give you the quality of cubemaps, but they are faster to update and require less memory. And in the console world, requiring less is almost reason enough to pick this method over cubemaps."

He goes on to share several reference articles and a math overview before providing code for developers to experiment with generating their own reflections with paraboloid maps.

Hayward notes that there are a couple faults to watch out for in addition to reduced quality: "One drawback of paraboloid maps is that the environment geometry has to be sufficiently tessellated or we will have noticeable artifacts on our reflector. Another drawback is that on spherical objects, we will see seems. However, with objects that have convex and concave polygons, the seem won't be as noticeable."