RenderPearl

New Features

• Hand light now has screen space ray traced shadows.
  • A new Hand Light shader pack options screen has been added to control this feature.

Improvements

• Hand light is now handled separately for each hand.
• Hand light sources are now positioned more closely to actual hand positions.
• Significant improvements have been made that depend on the Subgroup Operations Compatibility option.
  • Lights are now de-duplicated using subgroup operations before being added to the global light list, significantly reducing the capacity required to avoid overflow and the time spent on global de-duplication.
  • Work group bounding box computations are now accelerated using subgroup operations.
  • Atomically pushing to buffers is now accelerated using subgroup operations.
  • SSBO and shared memory loads are now explicitly made subgroup uniform where possible, using subgroup operations.
• Volumetric light and SMAA neighborhood blending are now significantly faster thanks to optimizations made to work group neighborhood handling.
• Chunks are now culled in uniform control flow.
• Light list creation is now slightly faster when 16-bit integer types are unsupported.
• Sky rendering is now slightly faster, by skipping a work group barrier in tiles with no block lit geometry.
• Gbuffer data is now ordered more optimally following the RDNA Performance Guide.

Other Changes

• Amethyst Shards are now emissive.
• Ambient occlusion is now more visible. More improvements to ambient occlusion are planned.
• Hand light brightness now matches block light by default.
• Work group sizes have been retuned and optimized for modern AMD Radeon hardware. This could result in worse performance on some other hardware. Please report any significant issues.
• Subgroup operations are now assumed by default to be supported on all Radeon hardware.
• Immutable constants are now assumed by default to be supported on all Radeon hardware on Linux.
• A driver bug workaround for the work group size of the global light list de-duplication pass has been disabled on Mesa graphics drivers for Radeon. This could improve performance slightly in some situations.

Fixed Issues

• Light list sorting fails when multiple lights are at the exact same distance from the player.
• Unlit geometry is rendered with incorrect depth guarantees, causing undefined behavior.
• Fallback functions collide with disabled built-in 16-bit functions on AMD graphics drivers on Windows (driver bug).

GitHub Release