This disclosure presents a technique for utilizing ray tracing to produce a high quality visual scene that includes shadows while minimizing computing costs. Since the scene quality and computing cost is directly proportional to the number of rays used, this technique can lower the number of rays needed for shadow region rendering while maintaining a targeted visual quality for the scene. The process includes generating a complex pixel mask based on depth boundary testing, and generating a penumbra mask based on the shadow regions. These masks can use distance/depth data to cull certain pixels from their respective analysis to reduce processing time. A penumbra area can then be denoised using the two masks and the distance/depth data. Finally, the depth boundary pixel computations, i.e., complex pixels, can be resolved. From these processes, a final shadow mask can be generated and sent to the rendering process to complete the scene rendering.