Peter Sikachev
Virtuos
Peter Sikachev has been working on game graphics for over a decade. Before joining Virtuos, he had worked at Rockstar Toronto, Eidos Montreal, CD Projekt Red, and People Can Fly. Peter has contributed to such titles as Red Dead Redemption 2, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Cyberpunk 2077, and many others. He is also the author of multiple publications on game rendering, most notably 5 talks at SIGGRAPH and several book chapters in the GPU Pro/GPU Zen books series. Peter is currently a Rendering Lead at a newly formed Warsaw Virtuos Labs studio, assembling a new team to work on the advanced rendering technology for the best AAA titles.
Peter Sikachev is speaking at the following session/s
Directional Light Shadows Compute Time-Slicing Optimization
In UE5, sun directional shadow calculations are expensive, even when using predominantly Nanite assets. Having a day/night cycle and recomputing the sunlight directional shadow every frame is not affordable for most titles.
In our presentation, we outline the problems that Virtual Shadow Maps in UE5 have with the day/night cycle and propose one solution that consists of distributing shadow computation generated by sunlight between multiple frames.
We present potential performance gains that reach up to 70% on shadow computation as well as talk about visual losses that you may get with this algorithm.
We believe that by sharing this idea with developers, we can provide a better understanding of how shadow mapping can be optimized in UE5, as well as in other engines. Furthermore, our goal is to encourage developers to optimize their graphic bottlenecks, so they can gain more frame time budget for other assets and technologies in their games.
Session Takeaway
- Low-level understanding of Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) Clipmap technology in Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) and its limitations
- How to use time-slicing to optimize VSM for a dynamic day-night cycle game in UE5
Session speakers
