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A new interview with the Futuremark team (3DMark04 developers) was posted on Beyond3D:
http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/fm04/
If you look at page 3 you will see a few interesing comments about the shadowing techniches in the comming 3DMark2004:
I'm submiting this thread in the Halflife 2 Discussion section because I thing is good to discuss about the fact Futuremark developers agree the Valve decissions about using shadow maps instead of stencil shadows. I'm bored with the people blaming the Source engine all the time because it doesn't use stencil shadows like Doom 3 which is a very different game. IMO Halflife 2 doesn't need stencil shadows.
http://www.beyond3d.com/interviews/fm04/
If you look at page 3 you will see a few interesing comments about the shadowing techniches in the comming 3DMark2004:
In 3DMark03 Games tests 2 (Battle for Proxycon) and 3 (Trolls Lair) were designed to mimic the Doom3 rendering model in DirectX, with an initial Z-Only pass and then a shadow pass for each dynamic light. Will any of the game tests be following a similar rendering model as this, or is it "all change"?
Nick: The next 3DMark is completely different from what 3DMark03 is. The engine is new, shaders are new (dynamically runtime built HLSL shaders), the shadow technique is new. It is an all new 3DMark version!
Patric: I think we worked enough with stencil shadows last time. If you want to measure that, why not use 3DMark03? The early footage of Doom3 did indeed inspire us, but our goal was really not to try to ‘measure Doom3 performance’ or ‘mimic Doom3 in DX’. Also, stencil shadows are a better choice in darker indoor scenes with less space and less edges throwing shadow volumes. Our new shadow model is based on perspective shadow maps (PSM). There are no shadow volumes adding TONS of fill rate and vertex load like in stencil shadows, but it is still a global solution with self-shadowing. Who knows if some even better dynamic shadow implementation is invented for the 3DMark version after this next one.
In these two game tests the shadowing obviously makes heavy use of stencil shadows, which aren't necessarily the best for producing soft shadowing techniques. Are you looking at any alternative shadowing methods in the next 3DMark?
Patric: These days projected shadow maps seem like the best choice if you want soft dynamic shadows, and I think most games out today with soft shadows use that. There are extensions to perspective shadow maps offering soft shadows, but those tend to be very heavy on the hardware and more suitable for small tech demos than full scale games. For example the Smoothie trick requires the identification of the edges throwing the shadows, which was one of the burdens of stencil shadows. For soft shadows we would still probably choose projected shadow maps, but we did that already in 3DMark2001. Then again, back in the ‘2001 days sharp edged projected shadows were quite enough for the hardware.
I'm submiting this thread in the Halflife 2 Discussion section because I thing is good to discuss about the fact Futuremark developers agree the Valve decissions about using shadow maps instead of stencil shadows. I'm bored with the people blaming the Source engine all the time because it doesn't use stencil shadows like Doom 3 which is a very different game. IMO Halflife 2 doesn't need stencil shadows.