Claussen, Ute2015-10-052015-10-0519891017-4656https://doi.org/10.2312/egtp.19891024Today, the shading method of Phong plays an important role in the design of realtime image generation systems. Often, the model has been used in combination with a color interpolation, suppressing a main property of this model, namely the visually acceptable rendering of highlights. Unfortunately, Phong’s algorithm demands a normalization, which is expensive to implement in hardware. We will present several shading methods which are reductions of the Phong algorithm. They will be compared both visually and theoretically. The alternatives are judged concerning their costs for a hardware implementation. The result is a hierarchy of shading methods that can be used to select the required cost-performance ratio for a given visualization task.On Reducing the Phong Shading Method10.2312/egtp.19891024