ABSTRACT
The light pre-pass renderer [Engel 08, Engel 09, Engel 09a] is becoming an ever more popular choice of rendering architecture for modern real-time applications that have extensive dynamic lighting requirements. In this article we introduce and describe techniques that can be used to accelerate the real-time lighting of an arbitrary three-dimensional scene on the Cell Broadband Engine without adding any additional frames of latency to the target application. The techniques described in this article were developed for the forthcoming PLAYSTATION3 version of Blur (see Figure 2.1), slated for release in 2010.1
2.1 Introduction As GPUs have become more powerful, people have sought to use them for purposes other than graphics. This has opened an area of research called GPGPU (General Purpose GPU), which even major graphics card manufacturers are embracing. For example, all NVIDIA GeForce GPUs now support PhysX technology, which enables physics calculations to be performed on the GPU.
