Crysis 2 - DirectX 11 - Custom Sprite Bokeh Depth of Field

Crysis 2 - Custom DOF Bokeh Filter
Improved Depth of Field is also another DirectX 11 staple and in Crysis 2, Crytek takes it a step further with the use of a sprite rendering technique. A bad depth of field implementation just looks like general blur filter was applied for the entire scene at the back, with no account for distance and light refraction. In simple DX9 implementation, the light in the back appears much more scattered and can be distracting compared to the custom shaped bokeh filter implementation in DX11 mode, allowing for a much higher range of defocused areas. Similar to tessellation, DoF requires a great amount of GPU computing power and can be inefficient if implemented at full resolution with today's hardware so Crytek has added optimizations and applies the filter at half the resolution.