Background. The game-industry is rapidly demanding more and more comput-ing power in its strive for more realistic renditions of environments, simulations andgraphics. To accelerate the improvements made to the realism of real time graph-ics further, optimizations like Clustered and Cascaded Clustered Shading come intoplay. The purpose of these techniques is to reduce the time it takes to render aframe by dividing the view frustum into smaller segments called clusters that canthen be used for light calculations. Cascaded Clustered Shading is a slightly morecustomizable method which aims to improve on Clustered Shading by allowing morecontrol over how the view frustum is divided into clusters.

Objectives. The goal of our thesis is to explore the effectiveness of Cascaded Clus-tered Shading compared to Clustered Shading in a scene with 64, 256, 1024 and 4096lights respectively. It is also to find the trend of what type of subdivision pattern thatperforms best in what situation. Thus proving or disproving the theory that moreuniform cluster sizes are beneficial in reducing the complexity of light calculations incomparison to the increasing cluster sizes present in Clustered Shading.

Methods. To answer these questions we implemented the techniques in a test scenewhere we could easily compare the performance of the different subdivision patternsand techniques with 64, 256, 1024 and 4096 lights respectively. Three different pat-terns were tested, one with an increasing number of subdivisions per layer P1 (anincrease in the number of clusters per layer). One with a static number of subdi-visions per layer P2, representing the performance of Clustered Shading. One witha decreasing number of subdivisions per layer P3. Additional performance metricsto be recorded were added, measuring the time it took for the different parts of thetechnique so that not just the general performance could be compared. Thus themethod used was a quantitative research method of implementation and experimen-tation.

Results. The results supports the theory that more uniform cluster sizes tend tobe beneficial when rendering a scene with many lights showing a clear trend to favora pattern creating more uniform clusters P1. However the results also show a con-tradicting overall performance increase (comparing FPS) using the reversed patternwith sharply increasing cluster sizes based on the distance from the camera P3. Theoverall performance of pattern P1 and P3 was better than P2.

Conclusions. The conclusions drawn from the results are that Cascaded ClusteredShading perform better than Clustered Shading in most cases depending on the pat-tern, and that more uniform cluster sizes are beneficial when rendering many lightsin most cases.