For the most part I've just been experimenting with deferred lighting. As far as what I'm trying to accomplish, I view this stuff like a musician doing scales. Good practice, but the goal is to get familiar with the techniques rather than produce anything "real".
I'd already built up a quick and dirty deferred lighting implementation a couple months before. This weekend I removed some of the hacks I had, added HDR + bloom, threw in some simple terrain, played around with LogLuv encoding, and fixed some artifacts from my first pass implementation.
I suppose that sounds a lot but the nice thing about XNA is there are a bazillion samples out there. The deferred lighting is the thing I'm really concentrating on, so for the other stuff I just grabbed anything I could find. Terrain, and HDR and bloom came pretty much as-is from samples/demos, as did a FPS counter.
As far as the deferred lighting goes, I finally got the half texel offset stuff cleared up. In Direct3D 9, pixel coordinates and texture coordinates don't line up, so when doing something like sampling a normal buffer or lighting buffer, if you don't offset them properly you'll be sampling the lighting from the wrong texel. This entry by Wolfgang Engel was a big help here.
Reading Engel's ShaderX7 article, I also understood why the specular lighting has to be multiplied by n dot l, and fixed up some artifacts I would have due to that (mainly specular appearing on backfaces).
My first pass at HDR used FP16 render targets for everything. I changed the final apply lighting pass to encode into LogLUV, and then implemented the encoding for the lighting buffer suggested by Pat Wilson's article in ShaderX7. A side effect of the very simple material model I'm using allowed me to use a 8:8:8:8 buffer for this and still allow for high range when accumulating lighting. I currently don't have separate diffuse and specular albedo, so when I apply lighting the equation looks like this:
albedo*(diffuseLighting + specularLighting)
This is part of the joy of a small demo - no artists telling me they have to have a separate specular albedo :). Anyway, I realized that I can just add those together before writing to the lighting buffer, and just do a straightforward encoding of the result in LogLUV space. I do want to put control of the glossiness in the material model, but that will require encoding the depth into 24 bits of a render target and then including an 8 bit specular power in the remainder. (I have to render depth to a separate target because XNA gives no facility for sampling the depth buffer).
In the process of all of this I wasn't quite getting the performance I wanted. I'm doing this on my Dell M1330 laptop which while no slouch, has trouble running World of Warcraft at a decent frame rate. But given such a simple scene, I was just shy of 60 fps so I decided to see if I could fire up NVPerfHUD and see what was going on. You can run NVPerfHUD with XNA apps, but a side effect I discovered is all vertex processing is done in software.
This is a bummer since it greatly throws off timings (a draw call for one mesh took 5 ms on the CPU for a unbelievably simple vertex shader), but I was able to find some GPU hotspots, some of which I at improved by pulling stuff out of the shader and on to the CPU.
Anyway, not sure how much I'll be working on this stuff but when I do I'll try to put the odd post up here. I haven't tried running my latest incarnation on the 360, which will probably be my next step. I think I've got the render targets set up so it should work, assuming the XNA runtime isn't doing anything retarded under the hood. But without PIX on the 360 it'll be hard to really dig into that.
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