Will the lightprobes feature be calculated on the GPU ?

[anon_78430655]

Hey,

Will the upcoming lightprobes feature of Unity3D 3.5 be calculated on the GPU or the CPU or a combination of both ?

[zine92]

Hopefully on the GPU. GPUs are so powerful nowadays.

[hippocoder]

My understanding of it is it’s done on the CPU. They may optimize for unity desktop though it seems like a really fast operation. It might not need to be on GPU?

Bear in mind it was a technique developed for mobiles so it had to be stupid fast. The shader is of course GPU…

[Jessy]

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2011/06/08/advanced-shading-and-lighting-for-mobile/

@Aras Pranckevič

Unity already applies spherical harmonics lighting in forward rendering (all “not important” lights + ambient goes there), taking light probes into account has no additional cost at all on the GPU. There’s only very small cost on the CPU per object (to find, interpolate the probes and add them to SH info).

From that, I get the impression that your question isn’t worth being concerned about. Details would be interesting, no doubt, but it’s probably all tucked away in source code.