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Deferred Rendering in Kill Zone

This document summarizes a presentation on deferred rendering techniques used in the video game Killzone 2. The key points are: - Deferred rendering was used to improve performance over traditional forward rendering by separating geometry from lighting passes. - A G-buffer stored surface properties like depth, normals, motion vectors, and albedo in render targets. - Multiple rendering passes were done: first to fill the G-buffer, then for lighting, shadows, decals, and post-processing. - Lights were rendered as geometry and tested against the G-buffer to determine lit pixels before shading. - Techniques like cascaded shadow maps and stabilizing light matrices helped improve sun shadows.

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4K views

Deferred Rendering in Kill Zone

This document summarizes a presentation on deferred rendering techniques used in the video game Killzone 2. The key points are: - Deferred rendering was used to improve performance over traditional forward rendering by separating geometry from lighting passes. - A G-buffer stored surface properties like depth, normals, motion vectors, and albedo in render targets. - Multiple rendering passes were done: first to fill the G-buffer, then for lighting, shadows, decals, and post-processing. - Lights were rendered as geometry and tested against the G-buffer to determine lit pixels before shading. - Techniques like cascaded shadow maps and stabilizing light matrices helped improve sun shadows.

Uploaded by

sscherten3184
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 55

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON

Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2

Michal Valient
Senior Programmer, Guerrilla

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Talk Outline

‣ Forward & Deferred Rendering Overview


‣ G-Buffer Layout
‣ Shader Creation
‣ Deferred Rendering in Detail
‣ Rendering Passes
‣ Light and Shadows
‣ Post-Processing
‣ SPU Usage / Architecture

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Forward & Deferred Rendering Overview

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Forward Rendering – Single Pass

‣ For each object


‣ Find all lights affecting object
‣ Render all lighting and material in a single shader
‣ Shader combinations explosion
‣ Shader for each material vs. light setup combination
‣ All shadow maps have to be in memory
‣ Wasted shader cycles
‣ Invisible surfaces / overdraw
‣ Triangles outside light influence

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Forward Rendering – Multi-Pass

‣ For each light


‣ For each object
‣ Add lighting from single light to frame buffer
‣ Shader for each material and light type
‣ Wasted shader cycles
‣ Invisible surfaces / overdraw
‣ Triangles outside light influence
‣ Lots of repeated work
‣ Full vertex shaders, texture filtering

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Deferred Rendering

‣ For each object


‣ Render surface properties into the G-Buffer
‣ For each light and lit pixel
‣ Use G-Buffer to compute lighting
‣ Add result to frame buffer
‣ Simpler shaders
‣ Scales well with number of lit pixels
‣ Does not handle transparent objects

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


G-Buffer Layout

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Target Image
Depth
View-space normal
Specular intensity
Specular roughness / Power
Screen-space 2D motion vector
Albedo (texture colour)
Deferred composition
Image with post-processing (depth of field, bloom, motion blur, colorize, ILR)
G-Buffer : Our approach

R8 G8 B8 A8
Depth 24bpp Stencil DS

Lighting Accumulation RGB Intensity RT0

Normal X (FP16) Normal Y (FP16) RT1

Motion Vectors XY Spec-Power Spec-Intensity RT2

Diffuse Albedo RGB Sun-Occlusion RT3

‣ MRT - 4xRGBA8 + 24D8S (approx 36 MB)


‣ 720p with Quincunx MSAA
‣ Position computed from depth buffer and pixel coordinates

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


G-Buffer : Our approach

R8 G8 B8 A8
Depth 24bpp Stencil DS

Lighting Accumulation RGB Intensity RT0

Normal X (FP16) Normal Y (FP16) RT1

Motion Vectors XY Spec-Power Spec-Intensity RT2

Diffuse Albedo RGB Sun-Occlusion RT3

‣ Lighting accumulation – output buffer


‣ Intensity – luminance of Lighting accumulation
‣ Scaled to range [0…2]
‣ Normal.z = sqrt(1.0f - Normal.x2 - Normal.y2)

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


G-Buffer : Our approach

R8 G8 B8 A8
Depth 24bpp Stencil DS

Lighting Accumulation RGB Intensity RT0

Normal X (FP16) Normal Y (FP16) RT1

Motion Vectors XY Spec-Power Spec-Intensity RT2

Diffuse Albedo RGB Sun-Occlusion RT3

‣ Motion vectors – screen space


‣ Specular power - stored as log2(original)/10.5
‣ High range and still high precision for low shininess
‣ Sun Occlusion - pre-rendered static sun shadows
‣ Mixed with real-time sun shadow for higher quality

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


G-Buffer Analysis

‣ Pros:
‣ Highly packed data structure
‣ Many extra attributes
‣ Allows MSAA with hardware support

‣ Cons:
‣ Limited output precision and dynamic range
‣ Lighting accumulation in gamma space
‣ Can use different color space (LogLuv)
‣ Attribute packing and unpacking overhead

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Deferred Rendering Passes

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Geometry Pass

‣ Fill the G-Buffer with all geometry (static, skinned, etc.)


‣ Write depth, motion, specular, etc. properties

‣ Initialize light accumulation buffer with pre-baked light


‣ Ambient, Incandescence, Constant specular
‣ Lightmaps on static geometry
‣ YUV color space, S3TC5 with Y in Alpha
‣ Sun occlusion in B channel
‣ Dynamic range [0..2]
‣ Image based lighting on dynamic geometry

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Image Based Lighting

‣ Artist placed light probes


‣ Arbitrary location and density
‣ Sampled and stored as 2nd order spherical harmonics

‣ Updated per frame for each object


‣ Blend four closest SHs based on distance
‣ Rotate into view space
‣ Encode into 8x8 envmap IBL texture
‣ Dynamic range [0..2]
‣ Generated on SPUs in parallel to other rendering tasks

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Scene lighting
Decals and Weapon Passes

‣ Primitives updating subset of the G-Buffer


‣ Bullet holes, posters, cracks, stains
‣ Reuse lighting of underlying surface
‣ Blend with albedo buffer
‣ Use G-Buffer Intensity channel to fix accumulation
‣ Same principle as particles with motion blur

‣ Separate weapon pass with different projection


‣ Different near plane
‣ Rendered into first 5% of depth buffer range
‣ Still reacts to lights and post-processing

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Light Accumulation Pass

‣ Light is rendered as convex geometry


‣ Point light – sphere
‣ Spot light – cone
‣ Sun – full-screen quad

‣ For each light…


‣ Find and mark visible lit pixels
‣ If light contributes to screen
‣ Render shadow map
‣ Shade lit pixels and add to framebuffer

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Determine Lit Pixels

‣ Marks pixels in front of the far light boundary


‣ Render back-faces of light volume
‣ Depth test GREATER-EQUAL
‣ Write to stencil on depth pass
‣ Skipped for very small distant lights

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Determine Lit Pixels

‣ Find amount of lit pixels inside the volume


‣ Start pixel query
‣ Render front faces of light volume
‣ Depth test LESS-EQUAL
‣ Don’t write anything – only EQUAL stencil test

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Render Shadow Map

‣ Enable conditional rendering


‣ Based on query results from previous stage
‣ GPU skips rendering for invisible lights

‣ Max 1024x1024xD16 shadow map


‣ Fast and with hardware filtering support
‣ Single map reused for all lights

‣ Skip small objects


‣ Small in shadow map and on screen
‣ Artist defined thresholds for lights and objects

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Shade Lit Pixels

‣ Render front-faces of light volume


‣ Depth test - LESS-EQUAL
‣ Stencil test - EQUAL
‣ Runs only on marked pixels inside light

‣ Compute light equation


‣ Read and unpack G-Buffer attributes
‣ Calculate Light vector, Color, Distance Attenuation
‣ Perform shadow map filtering

‣ Add Phong lighting to frame buffer

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Light Optimization

‣ Determine light size on the screen


‣ Approximation - angular size of light volume

‣ If light is “very small”


‣ Don’t do any stencil marking
‣ Switch to non-shadow casting type

‣ Shadows fade-out range


‣ Artist defined light sizes at which:
‣ Shadows start to fade out
‣ Switch to non-shadow casting light

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Sun Rendering

‣ Full screen quad

‣ Stencil mark potentially lit pixels


‣ Use only sun occlusion from G-Buffer

‣ Run final shader on marked pixels


‣ Approx. 50% of pixels skipped thanks 1st pass
‣ Also skybox/background
‣ Simple directional light model
‣ Shadow = min(RealTimeShadow, Occlusion)

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Sun – Real-Time Shadows

‣ Cascade shadow maps


‣ Provide more shadow detail where required
‣ Divide view frustum into several areas
‣ Split along view distance
‣ Split distances defined by artist
‣ Render shadow map for each area
‣ Max 4 cascades
‣ Max 512x512 pixels each in single texture
‣ Easy to address cascade in final render

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Sun – Real-Time Shadows

‣ Issue: Shadow shimmering


‣ Light cascade frustums follow camera
‣ Sub pixel changes in shadow map

‣ Solution!
‣ Don’t rotate shadow map cascade
‣ Make bounding sphere of cascade frustum
‣ Use it to generate cascade light matrix
‣ Remove sub-pixel movements
‣ Project world origin onto shadow map
‣ Use it to round light matrix to nearest shadow pixel corner

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Sun - Colored shadow Cascades - Unstable shadow artifacts
MSAA Lighting Details

‣ Run light shader at pixel resolution


‣ Read G-Buffer for both pixel samples
‣ Compute lighting for both samples
‣ Average results and add to frame buffer

‣ Optimization in shadow map filtering


‣ Max 12 shadow taps per pixel
‣ Alternate taps between both samples
‣ Half quality on edges, full quality elsewhere
‣ Performance equal to non-MSAA case

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Forward Rendering Pass

‣ Used for transparent geometry


‣ Single pass solution
‣ Shader has four uberlights
‣ No shadows
‣ Per-vertex lighting version for particles

‣ Lower resolution rendering available


‣ Fill-rate intensive effects
‣ Half and quarter screen size rendering
‣ Half resolution rendering using MSAA HW

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Post-Processing Pass

‣ Highly customizable color correction


‣ Separate curves for shadows, mid-tones, highlight colors, contrast and
brightness
‣ Everything Depth dependent
‣ Per-frame LUT textures generated on SPU
‣ Image based motion blur and depth of field
‣ Internal lens reflection
‣ Film grain filter

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Usage and Architecture
Putting it all together

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Usage

‣ We use SPU a lot during rendering


‣ Display list generation
‣ Main display list
‣ Lights and Shadow Maps
‣ Forward rendering
‣ Scene graph traversal / visibility culling
‣ Skinning
‣ Triangle trimming
‣ IBL generation
‣ Particles

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Usage (cont.)

‣ Everything is data driven


‣ No “virtual void Draw()” calls on objects
‣ Objects store a decision-tree with DrawParts
‣ DrawParts link shader, geometry and flags
‣ Decision tree used for LODs, etc.

‣ SPUs pull rendering data directly from objects


‣ Traverse scenegraph to find objects
‣ Process object's decision-tree to find DrawParts
‣ Create displaylist from DrawParts

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI
PHYSICS PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW PPU

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


SPU Architecture

DRAW
GAME, AI PREPARE GAME, AI PREPARE
PHYSICS DRAW
DATA
PHYSICS DRAW PPU
LOCK

SPU 0

SPU 1

SPU 2

SPU 3

Particles, Skinning Main scenegraph + displaylist IBL generation


edgeGeom Shadow scenegraph + displaylist

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON


Conclusion

‣ Deferred rendering works well and gives us artistic


freedom to create distinctive Killzone look
‣ MSAA did not prove to be an issue
‣ Complex geometry with no resubmit
‣ Highly dynamic lighting in environments
‣ Extensive post-process

‣ Still a lot of features planned


‣ Ambient occlusion / contact shadows
‣ Shadows on transparent geometry
‣ More efficient anti-aliasing
‣ Dynamic radiosity

GUERRILLA | DEVELOP CONFERENCE | JULY ‘07 | BRIGHTON

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