Quantitative analysis of the radiative behavior of the accretion shock. Panel a is a schematic representation of the star and inner disk system, where the solid line is the location of the accretion shock that envelopes both the protostar and the disk. The dashed lines represent four rays launched from the center of the system along which the location of the accretion shock is found and its radiative efficiency measured just upstream from it (numbered red dots). The resulting measurements are presented in panels b and c. North and South (respectively solid and dashed lines in panel b and East and West (respectively solid and dashed lines in panel c are shown for all simulations. These display the polar and equatorial radiative efficiencies (respectively f_acc, pol and f_acc, eq; see Eqs. (31) and (32)).