This looks amazing. Would you be willing to share how you did some of this?

Sure thing :)

My implementation was pretty much based on a presentation by Johan Andersson at DICE about DX11 rendering.

The slides can be found here: http://dice.se/publications/directx-11-rendering-in-battlefield-3/

It gives a pretty nice overview of the entire process, assuming you're familiar with compute shaders and DX11's shading pipeline in general.

I'm sure there'll be code samples around as well online if you look around for a while.

We are well aware, just was curious as to how different this method is to the differed rendering for lighting. We have a nasty issue of trying to get differed rendering to play with forward rendering... as some of our elements do not work with differed rendering.

I saw some of the other stuff you are doing with your engine and it looks appealing. Anyway thanks again and hope all is well with your project

EDIT: Do you know how this system handles shadows? Our issue with our point light system now is it bleeds through the blocks. We added dynamic shadows but that rapes through the FPS... fairly quickly when you add in 10 lights or more. Thoughts on this?

I still have to figure out how I want to do shadows with this system, as the idea of creating a special case in my compute shader for doing shadows for a variable amount of shadowing lights doesn't really sound appealing.

I'll probably just start by rendering shadowing lights on top of the tiled lighting results with regular deferred shading.

Normally seeing I'll try to always limit my shadowing lights to the absolute minimum required to make a scene look good. If the contribution of a certain shadowing light is not significant enough (what you specify as significant is up to yourself of course) I just turn off shadow mapping for that light.

To be honest with you, I don't even have any test scenario's right now where I have 10 simultaneous shadow map generating lights.

Then again you could try to play around with your shadow map resolution and maybe some more efficient culling strategies while generating your shadow maps.

As for requiring forward rendering, I assume you're talking about rendering transparent materials? Most engines don't really seem to care all that much about lighting complexity when it comes to rendering transparent objects, so they just render them on top of the lit scene with maybe a few lights enabled.

There's a Forward++ vs deferring rendering comparison from last GDC. Personally I've never been completely sold on deferred but whatever the DICE presentation is linked, I think this data should have to go too.

That is amazing thank you very much!