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 chapter 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 chapter were developed for the forthcoming PLAYSTATION3
version of Blur (see Figure 2.1), slated for release in 2010.1
As GPUs have become more powerful, people have sought to use them for pur-
poses other than graphics. This has opened an area of research called GPGPU
(General Purpose GPU), which even major graphics card manufacturers are em-
bracing. For example, all NVIDIA GeForce GPUs now support PhysX technology,
which enables physics calculations to be performed on the GPU.
