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We propose a progressive radiance estimation engine (PREE) hardware architecture to accelerate the processing of the progressive photon mapping with satisfactory graphic quality. The presented PREE architecture consists of four progressive radiance estimation units (PREUs), approximate full task schedule-oriented hit-point update operation controller (AFTSO-HpUOC) and approximate data-independent schedule-oriented radiance evaluation controller (ADISO-REC). The PREUs accelerate the radiance estimation computation by a pipeline technique and share and configure the hardware resource for hit-point update operation and radiance evaluation. Through AFTSO-HpUOC and ADISO-REC, the data can be efficiently dispatched to achieve better parallelism and the data dependence can be alleviated within the four PREUs, respectively. The core area of the proposed PREE architecture implemented in TSMC 90-nm CMOS process is 1.78 mm2. According to the post-layout simulation results, the implementation achieves 496.79 million hit-point update operations per second (MHpUO/s) and consumes 184 mW at 125 MHz for Cornell box with three balls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]