Bio
James McLaren is a Senior Principal Tech
Programmer working at Guerrilla. He started programming on a ZX Spectrum at the
age 10 and has been working in the video game industry for over 25 years and
across 3 continents.
In 2018 he moved to Amsterdam and has been
working hard to make Decima tick faster than usual ever since. He can be found
lurking on Twitter at @selfresonating.
Description
To accelerate its foliage and alpha tested
geometry Horizon Forbidden West implements a novel loosely tiled deferred
texturing system. A visibility buffer is drawn as a pre-pass followed by
analysis and shading steps which run entirely in compute shaders. The use of
compute shaders also provides extra flexibility that allows for the
implementation of a software variable rate shading solution. Due to being able
to run on the compute pipes on PS4 and PS5 it is able to overlap both the
G-Buffer rendering and the rendering of cascaded shadow maps meaning that
analysis and shading typically have very little overhead. This presentation
describes the details of the system, and the optimizations and design choices
made to integrate it into the Decima engine.
