Bump Mapping

After the qualitative comparison of different implementation variants, we will now examine how these quality differences show up with activated decal and bump map textures. Unfortunately bump mapping or even texture mapping is not possible for shaders with 16 bit cube map normalization as all four texture units are occupied by this task. Surprisingly the different normalization techniques and precision issues shown in the preceding two Sections have very little impact on the obtained image quality when bump mapping is used (Figure 11).

Figure 11: Comparison of Different Bump Map Methods

We assume that the different surface normals read from the normal map result in rapid changing lighting intensities and therefore the less perfect shading qualities get lost in noise.