The GPU Gems article talks about summed area tables in the context of variance shadow maps, specifically percentage closer soft shadows variance shadow maps whe

The GPU Gems article talks about summed area tables in the context of variance shadow maps, specifically percentage closer soft shadows variance shadow maps where variable-width blurs are used extensively. Didn't really mean to cite the stuff about VSMs (sorry), more so the SAT stuff toward the latter half of the article as it would apply to DoF. I believe the precision/overflow issues can be mitigated using modern GPU hardware (the authors mention this in section 8.5.2 of the article.) Now-a-days it is pretty much standard to have floating-point render targets (especially with deferred rendering and light-pre pass renderers) so 16/32 bits per component should be adequate especially if you apply the tricks the authors present in the article. Not to mention that now we have DirectCompute/OpenCL/CUDA. Though I don't really see people talking about SATs that much (I myself have never implemented them.) Maybe there is an underlying reason why people don't? Bandwidth maybe? I would imagine it would be pretty taxing on the system to recompute the SAT every frame.