Parallel Importing of OBJ Meshes in CUDA

Abstract

Alias | Wavefront OBJ meshes are a common text file type for transferring 3D mesh data between applications made by different vendors. However, as the mesh complexity gets higher and denser, the files become larger and slower to import. This paper explores the use of GPUs to accelerate the importing and parsing of OBJ files by studying file read-times, runtimes and load resistance. We propose a new method of reading and parsing that circumvents GPU architecture limitations and improves performance, seeing the new GPU method outperform CPU methods with a 6-8x speedup. When run on a heavily loaded system, the new method only received an 80% performance hit, compared to the 160% that the CPU methods received. The loaded GPU speedup compared to unloaded CPU methods was 3.5x, and, when compared to loaded CPU methods, 8x. These results demonstrate that the time is right for further research into the use of data-parallel GPU acceleration beyond that of computer graphics and high performance computing.