• Journal of the Korea Computer Graphics Society
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• v.23 no.3
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• pp.55-64
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• 2017

In this paper, a novel soft shadow method is suggested to support realistic shadows in mobile ray tracing. In ray tracing, soft shadow is generally generated by sampling a shadow ray. As this sampling method increases the number of rays to be processed, it has undermined the performance. We designed the proposed soft shadow processing method and hardware architecture to overcome this problem through selective shadow generation and triangle address caching for minimizing the performance degradation caused by sampling. The proposed hardware architecture can be integrated into a mobile ray-tracing hardware and was evaluated in terms of its performance on the FPGA. Based on the results, the rendering performance about 4, 8, and 16 samples were improved, respectively, by 40%, 50%, and 56% on average compared to the previous method, and it was found that the real-time soft shadow processing is feasible with the proposed hardware architecture.