Last Updated:
05
/
08
/
2004
Normalization Heuristics
This whitepaper answers the question, “When is cube-map normalization faster than normalize()?” It describes experiments performed with a non-trivial pixel shader, and uses the experimental results to derive useful rules of thumb regarding the performance and quality of normalization in pixel shaders. These heuristics provide tuning dials that developers can use to trade quality for performance (and vice versa) in 3D applications. To gain an intuitive understanding of these performance-quality tradeoffs, a demonstration application is provided to allow the same experiments described in this report.
