GPU-based Streaming for Parallel Level of Detail on Massive Model Rendering

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, and does not scale well with the size of the models. We present a GPU-based progressive mesh simplification approach which enables the 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 develop a novel data structure to represent the progressive LOD mesh, and design a parallel mesh simplification algorithm towards GPU architecture. Second, we propose a GPU-based streaming approach which adopt a frame-to-frame coherence scheme in order to minimize the high communication cost between CPU and GPU. Our results show that the parallel mesh simplification algorithm and GPU-based streaming approach significantly improve the overall rendering performance.