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Abstract:
One of the best choices for fast, high quality shadows is the shadow
volume algorithm. However, for real time applications the extraction
of silhouette edges can significantly burden the CPU, especially
with highly tessellated input geometry or when complex geometry
shaders are applied.
In this paper we show how this last, expensive part of the shadow
volume method can be implemented on programmable graphics hardware.
This way, the originally hybrid shadow volumes algorithm can now be
reformulated as a purely hardware-accelerated approach.
The benefits of this implementation is not only the increase in speed.
Firstly, all computations now run on the same hardware
resulting in consistent precision within all steps of the
algorithm. Secondly, programmable vertex transformations
are no longer problematic when applied to shadow casting objects.
