Performance Comparison of Shadow Techniques for 3D Game Characters Based on Unity 3D

The shadow of 3D graphics increases the realism. This paper presents the performance comparison of four kinds of shadow techniques such as soft, hard, projector based, and quad texture based shadow for 3D game characters based on Unity 3D. While changing the number of 3D characters from 20 to 100, the rendering speeds of four shadow techniques are compared. Overall the rendering speed of quad texture based shadow technique is the best, which obtains the maximum performance gain of 62.9% than the rendering speed of projector based shadow. The performance results can be applied to the game development with numerous characters considering the trade-off between the rendering speed and the shadow quality.