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http://dx.doi.org/10.5573/JSTS.2015.15.1.145

A Reconfigurable Lighting Engine for Mobile GPU Shaders  

Ahn, Jonghun (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chungnam National University)
Choi, Seongrim (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chungnam National University)
Nam, Byeong-Gyu (Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chungnam National University)
Publication Information
JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science / v.15, no.1, 2015 , pp. 145-149 More about this Journal
Abstract
A reconfigurable lighting engine for widely used lighting models is proposed for low-power GPU shaders. Conventionally, lighting operations that involve many complex arithmetic operations were calculated by the shader programs on the GPU, which led to a significant energy overhead. In this letter, we propose a lighting engine to improve the energy-efficiency by supporting the widely used advanced lighting models in hardware. It supports the Blinn-Phong, Oren-Nayar, and Cook-Torrance models, by exploiting the logarithmic arithmetic and optimizing the trigonometric function evaluations for the energy-efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate 12.7%, 42.5%, and 35.5% reductions in terms of power-delay product from the shader program implementations for each lighting model. Moreover, our work shows 10.1% higher energy-efficiency for the Blinn-Phong model compared to the prior art.
Keywords
Lighting engine; shader; mobile GPU; reconfigurable architecture; logarithmic arithmetic;
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  • Reference
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