Variance Shadow Maps Demo (D3D10)

Nice job Andy, the demo looks beautiful!

The SAVSM's look great, although I'm more than happy with the results I've been getting with just standard VSM + 4x MSAA + 5x5 Blur (great shadow quality with minimal swimming, and good performance on my 8800 GTS). Fits in nicely with deferred rendering, too. I may try out something similar to your parallel-split VSM implementation, as I've been having a bit of trouble getting the shadows to look good for large outdoor scenes with directional lighting from the sun.

 

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=39569

Jawed

 

Although I have no idea how this demo looks like (still on XP with a NV45), I have to commend you Andy on your VSM work. Just thought I'd drop a reminder of my post almost exactly one year ago.

 

Wily Ferret must going through some kind of menopausal phase at the moment, as he comes across as being rather snappy and bitter about anything he reports on right now.

 

Hello

I have Vista Business with DX 10 and an XFX 8800GTX 768MB Video card.

I have also installed the DX9.0C redist runtimes and I get the following error

 

Congratulations!

 

Not sure what you installed, but the April 2007 DirectX redist should include that DLL.

 

Have you tried just to copy that DLL in the folder where themo is installed?

 

Andy, did you get to toy with an 2900XT?Hardware PCF seems to be unreasonably slow(which is odd) and the INT32 mode doesn`t quite work(it produces gibberish). I`m asking because I`m curious as to how you perceive the competing architectures, rather than getting a fix for the bugs.

 

In my own implementation, when I try to implement AA, the CreateTexture2D function fails.

This works:

Code:

D3D10_TEXTURE2D_DESC td;
td.Width              = 512;
td.Height             = 512;
td.MipLevels          = 0;
td.ArraySize          = 1;
td.Format             = DXGI_FORMAT_R32G32_FLOAT;
td.SampleDesc.Count   = 1;
td.SampleDesc.Quality = 0;
td.Usage              = D3D10_USAGE_DEFAULT;
td.BindFlags          = D3D10_BIND_SHADER_RESOURCE | D3D10_BIND_RENDER_TARGET;
td.CPUAccessFlags     = 0;
td.MiscFlags          = 0;

HR(pd3dDevice->CreateTexture2D(&td, NULL, &g_pShadowMap));

But when I change the SampleDesc Count and Quality to 4 and 4 for 4xAA, CreateTexture2D fails. Do I need mipmapping as well? I've never toyed around with AA before.

 

Okay, I see. I need to set MipLevel to 1. But then creating the RTV fails. And I'm going to guess the SRV after that fails too.

Edit: I should really do more research before posting. D3D10_RTV_DIMENSION_TEXTURE2DMS.

Edit2: Now i either get "The view dimension declared in the shader code does not match the view type bound to slot 0 of the Pixel Shader unit. [ EXECUTION ERROR #354: DEVICE_DRAW_VIEW_DIMENSION_MISMATCH ]" or if I change the Texture2D in my shader code to Texture2DMS, then it doesn't compile, and for whatever reason, when I use DXUT, I don't get output on why it doesn't compile. The documentation on DX10 AA is so crappy!

 

Try explicitly setting td.Texture2D.MipSlice = 0 after setting td.ViewDimension = D3D10_RTV_DIMENSION_TEXTURE2DMS, since I remember having to do that in some code of my own recently for it to work with multisampling.

Also make sure your shadow map format supports multisampling on your device too, I guess (it should do, but there might be some combination of things that's stopping that for some reason).

 

No, I think the issue is you can't "sample" a multisample texture. Everywhere I go, I've seen the "load" function do it in HLSL, but I don't know how to use it. Using it clears up the FX failing to compile, but it doesn't quite sample the way I expect it to.

 

Are you using it like this?

Code:

Texture2DMS<float, NUM_SAMPLES> tex;
float firstSample = tex.Load(coords, 0);

I don't think you get 5 quality levels for 4-sample multisampling, so setting quality to 4 might fail though.

 

IIRC Nvidia uses sample count and quality to select their CSAA modes. The sample count is the number of color and Z samples actually stored in the framebuffer, and the quality is the total number of coverage samples. So Count=4 and Quality=4 is just plain 4xMSAA, (4,16) corresponds to the 16x mode, and (8,16) is 16xQ. I'm not sure what they do if the (Count,Quality) pair doesn't correspond to one of the modes they support directly, probably just round Quality up or down to the nearest supported level.

 

Oh oh oh, I figured it out. Load wants coordinates in integers. So you multiply the coordiates you want by the textures dimensions:

Code:

Texture2DMS<float2, 4> Texture;
//...
//Inside my VSM filter, where tex is the coordinates of I want to sample
float2 moments = Texture.Load(int3(tex.x * 512, tex.y * 512, 0), 0).xy;

But for whatever reason, the shadow appears more aliased.
Please help Andy!