Chalnoth said:It's not really solved except in one specific case, though. A PS3 version of the same rendering algorithm would be able to do all the lighting application in one pass, while still not doing the lighting calculations that don't need to be done. With Humus' algorithm you'll be sending geometry data to the video card many more times than you would with PS3, which may become the limiting factor in some situations.
This demo only implement one case, but it's not specific to this. It was mentioned for instance in another thread that you could do soft shadows with ps3.0 and only do the 64 samples when you detect you're in the prenumbra. This could just as well be implemented with this technique. And so much more.
Regarding high vertex count situations. You can solve that by rendering position to a texture, and use that to render the ifs. Sort of a deferred shader thing. That way you only need to draw a fullscreen quad. It will take a little more from the fragment shader, but will eliminate the vertex shader bottleneck.