4 ms·

I think he meant that most shaders only receive four light sources. However I am not a low level graphics guy but my understanding is that deferred or not most

• gambiting 12y ago
  a "light source" is nothing else than a collection of variables when passed in to the shader. Vector3 for the position, a float for the intensity, Vector3 for the colour and so on. Each one of them can be passed in as a uniform - with OpenGL 3.0 you should be able to pass in at the very least 1024 uniforms, but in most implementations the limit is much higher. So if you were only passing in the position of the light, you should be able to give at least 1024 lights to any shader.
• mattnewport 12y ago
  This hasn't been true for a long time and DX12 doesn't really change anything here. DX11 was already able to handle very large numbers of constants. The limit on how many lights you support in a shader is largely a factor of controlling the shader cost rather than one of constant space limits these days. Deferred renderers are very popular these days as well and don't really handle lights in the same way anyway. DX12 does offer some potential CPU side performance benefits when it comes to updating large numbers of constants efficiently which may well help performance when dealing with lots of dynamic lights but it's not adding any new capabilities beyond what DX11 offers.