> there are techniques to cull voxels that aren't visible Culling invisible voxels is fine. But to reconstruct a normal with sufficient precision, I’d say you

> there are techniques to cull voxels that aren't visible Culling invisible voxels is fine. But to reconstruct a normal with sufficient precision, I’d say you need to sample quite large area of nearby visible voxels. IMO the RAM bandwidth costs are prohibitive. As far as I understand it’s impossible to do in screen space because that would introduce artifacts near the edges of the objects. With traditional rasterizers, accurate per-pixel normals are very cheap to compute, i.e. some computations in the VS, then interpolation within triangle implemented in hardware, then a single lookup from the normal map in the PS. > lack of proper hardware support What hardware support would you need for them? GPUs are very efficient doing many kinds of general-purpose computing. For the storage, modern GPUs support volume tiled resources, at the first sight this feature in D3D 11.3 and 12.0 looks very suitable for these voxels: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn914605(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn9...