A Reconfigurable Lighting Engine for Mobile GPU Shaders

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.