I’m sorry if my question isn’t advanced enough for this forum… but yes i have read the red book, and yes i know openGL, so i hope i’m worthy of your attention
Now to the question:
The geForce 3 TI series have something nVidia calls shadow buffers. I have been working on shadows and phong lighting models using a normal plain geForce 3, and i was wondering what exactly these shadow buffers would give me (if anything). Could someone give an overview of why they are better than just using stencil shadows.
short description:
shadowbuffers are simple projected textures wich store distance from lightsource. you compare this distance then against the distance of every pixel you draw and shadow it like that…
pro:fast,simple,even softshadows,only an additional texture, wich has to be rendered first(fast)
constra:artefacts,only spotlights,getting rid of the artefacts is difficult
stencilshadows:
pro:work in every case(pointlights, directionallights),perpixelperfect hard shadows
contra:eating lot of fillrate,implementation more difficult
i dont like the shadowbuffers that much, cause i want omnidirectinal pointlights…
Shadow buffers are available on regular GeForce 3, too. In fact, the main thing the GF4 has over GF3 is higher bandwidth; linearly scaled in some areas; massively improved in others. Well, and the GF4MX doesn’t have half of the features of a regular GF3, as the 4MX == 2MX+speed bump.
