Efficient Sphere Rendering Revisited

Abstract

Glyphs are an intuitive way of displaying the results of atomistic simulations, usually as spheres. Raycasting of camera-aligned billboards is considered the state-of-the-art technique to render large sets of spheres in a rasterization-based pipeline since the approach was first proposed by Gumhold. Over time various acceleration techniques have been proposed, such as the rendering of point primitives as billboards, which are trivial to rasterize and avoid a high workload in the vertex pipeline. Other techniques attempt to optimize data upload and access patterns in shader programs, both relevant aspects for dynamic data. Recent advances in graphics hardware raise the question of whether these optimizations are still valid. We evaluate several rendering and data access scheme combinations on real-world datasets and derive recommendations for efficient rasterization-based sphere rendering.