A GPU-based Approach for Massive Model Rendering with Frame-to-Frame Coherence

Abstract

Rendering massive 3D models in real-time has long been recognized as a very challenging problem because of the limited computational power and memory space available in a workstation. Most existing rendering techniques, especially level of detail (LOD) processing, have suffered from their sequential execution natures. We present a GPU-based approach which enables interactive rendering of large 3D models with hundreds of millions of triangles. Our work contributes to the massive rendering research in two ways. First, we present a simple and efficient mesh simplification algorithm towards GPU architecture. Second, we propose a novel GPU out-of-core approach that adopts a frame-to-frame coherence scheme in order to minimize the high communication cost between CPU and GPU. Our results show that the parallel algorithm of mesh simplification and the GPU out-of-core approach significantly improve the overall rendering performance.