Publications - All Categories

Practical Occlusion Culling in Killzone 3

Michal Valient | Siggraph 2011, Vancouver, August 2011 | Category: Graphics, Programming

Killzone 3 features complex occluded environments. To cull non-visible geometry early in the frame, the game uses PlayStation 3 SPUs to rasterize a conservative depth buffer and perform fast synchronous occlusion queries against it. This talk presents an overview of the approach and key lessons learned during its development.

 

Practical Occlusion Culling on PS3

Will Vale | GDC 2011, San Francisco, March 2011 | Category: Graphics, Programming

Games always have too much stuff to render, but are often set in occluded environments, where much of what is in the view frustum is not visible to the camera. Occlusion culling tries to avoid rendering objects which the player can’t see.

Discussion of occlusion for games has tended to focus on the use of GPU pixel counters to determine whether or not an object is visible. This places additional stress on a limited resource, and has latency which has to be worked around, requiring a more complex pipeline.

For KILLZONE 3 we took a different approach - we use the SPUs to render a conservative depth buffer and perform queries against it. This allows us to cull objects very early in the frame, avoiding any pipeline costs for invisible objects.

This presentation talks about the ideas (and dead ends) we explored along the way, as well as explaining in detail what we ended up with.

 

The PlayStation®3’s SPUs in the Real World: A KILLZONE 2 Case Study

Michiel van der Leeuw | GDC 2009, San Francisco, March 2009 | Category: Graphics, Programming

This session describes many of the SPU techniques used in the engine used to develop KILLZONE 2 for the PlayStation 3. It first focuses on individual techniques for SPU's as well as covering how these techniques work together in the game engine each frame.

 

The Rendering Technology of Killzone 2

Michal Valient | GDC 2009, San Francisco, March 2009 | Category: Graphics, Programming

This presentation gives an overview of the rendering techniques used in KILLZONE 2. We put the main focus on the lighting and shadowing techniques of our deferred shading engine and how we made them play nicely with anti-aliasing.

 

Deferred Rendering in Killzone 2

Michal Valient | Develop 2007, Brighton, July 2007 | Category: Graphics, Programming

Next generation gaming brought high resolutions, very complex environments and large textures to our living rooms. With virtually every asset being inflated, it's hard to use traditional forward rendering and hope for rich, dynamic environments with extensive dynamic lighting. Deferred rendering, on the other hand, has been traditionally described as a nice technique for rendering of scenes with many dynamic lights, that unfortunately suffers from fill-rate problems and lack of anti-aliasing and very few games that use it were published.

In this talk, we will discuss our approach to face this challenge and how we designed a deferred rendering engine that uses multi-sampled anti-aliasing (MSAA). We will give in-depth description of each individual stage of our real-time rendering pipeline and the main ingredients of our lighting, post-processing and data management. We'll show how we utilize PS3's SPUs for fast rendering of a large set of primitives, parallel processing of geometry and computation of indirect lighting. We will also describe our optimizations of the lighting and our parallel split (cascaded) shadow map algorithm for faster and stable MSAA output.