Warframe’s new amazing Forward+ Renderer
Code name “JARILO”

Issues with Legacy Renderer
Fat lightmaps with questionable math, large patch download sizes as result
Poor realtime lighting implementation (separate passes, separate shaders, batches of 3 lights)
Single point sample light probes looks bad on large objects, limited coverage
Shadows are ‘wrong’ (dynamic characters merely deferred composite a darkening shadow)
Large, sprawling, divergent shader code base
Fill pass often constrained by texture inputs (need arrays!)
Decal support is poor, blends only, no attribute modification (need D Buffer)
Compute possibilities not explored
DirectX9 baseline limits us (cannot leverage texture arrays, compute)
SH Math mess (mixing -Z axis, unclear irradiance vs. radiance)
Cube probes are per-zone, should be radial/shape blended
Local reflections quality is below industry standard (and added geometry pass, heavy)
‘Half float’ for meshes sucks, generalized pack/unpack for uint16/uint8 encoding per object scale

Rolling hills of Venus to the metal indoor dungeons of a spaceship. Aim to be ‘the best looking F2P ever.’ or ‘I can’t believe this is free!’

Pillars of Design
Scaling (Runs on new phones, Nintendo Switch, up to Titan X)
Performance (Both in terms of speed but also memory consumption, we have ‘tons’ of characters)
Quality (PBR workflows, ‘cool factor’ features)

Ideal player quotes: “Looks amazing on my shitty laptop!” AND “I got a new GPU and I wow can’t believe the upgrade, Warframe-4-life!”

Features
High quality, precomputed indirect lighting
Reduced memory load - less lightmaps
High quality precomputed directional occlusion
Time of day, outdoor cascaded shadow maps
Indoor cached/precomputed shadow maps from low number of light sources
Attribute modifying decals (so called “D-buffer”)
Increased correctness (No AO in direct light)
Vastly less options for artists to worry about (“It just works, great defaults”)
PBR Atmospheric model
Temporal AA and effects are default
Improved real-time shadowing of characters
Improved indirect lighting on characters/dynamics
Reversed Z

Primary rendering features have 3 quality settings.
Secondary rendering features should have either ON/OFF or multiple quality settings.

Things we don’t care about
DirectX9, drop it next this year
Shader graphs (I favor strong defaults over large artist flexibility)
Massive amounts of dynamic geometry (its ok to pre-calculate/bake stuff)
“Thousands” of lights… not a deferred shading demo, we are after sub 100.

Recommendations
Explore Forward+/Clustering methods.
Sandbox code as Config, do not branch (sorry just no)
New shaders from scratch, with stricter modular approach (too much copy paste currently)