ABSTRACT

Contemporary mobile GPUs are very powerful and rich in features that make game and application content shine while preserving high performance. As developers want to make use of the latest features, we cannot forget about two very important factors. First, for a game to be successful, it must target as many people as possible around the world. This can be achieved only when using a lower set of features of the GPU because not everyone has a high-specification mobile device. Second, how can you make the player engage with your game for as long as possible? On mobile devices in particular it becomes a challenge because energy source is coming from a battery. Even though ARM’s technology is designed for low energy consumption, developers cannot forget that a battery has finite energy capacity. In this chapter we address this problem and help developers to deliver even better quality, higher performance, and longer battery life when playing games. As the subject is very wide and could be addressed to many areas of real-time graphics software development, we want to narrow the scope to one visual effect: soft shadows. We introduce a novel technique of rendering semi-dynamic soft shadows. Although the technique is robust, it cannot be applied for all use cases, and we also explain in which cases you may make the most of this technique.