Table 1: Comparison of the three proposed alternatives (fps
for surface subdivision).
OBJECT NITM TA VS OUTPUT OBJECT NITM TA VS OUTPUT
Pawn 1840 1966 4063 Teapot 1720 1873 3970
Bishop 1879 1989 4063 Spoon 1701 1810 3907
Queen 1850 1975 3998 Cup 1772 1920 3970
King 1820 1960 3975
Table 2: Frames per second for rendering the multiresolu-
tion objects in the test scenes.
OBJECT 1
st
it. 2
nd
it. OBJECT 1
st
it. 2
nd
it.
Pawn 2750 662 Teapot 2726 642
Bishop 2752 665 Spoon 2750 668
Queen 2735 660 Cup 2755 625
King 2742 659
observed, all the results are more than enough for
real time rendering. The worst results have been ob-
tained by the NITM approach, due to the accesses to
texture memory. There is an average improvement
of 6.8% in the TA proposal as texture memory ac-
cesses to vertices included in the adjacency structure
are prevented. The table shows that the VS OUTPUT
implementation gets an improvement of 120.8% and
106.6% regarding NITM and TA, respectively. This
increase in the performance is produced by practically
avoiding any access to texture memory. Since this op-
tion is obviously the best approach, the rest of the re-
sults shown in this sections refer exclusively to it.
Table 2 presents the rendering results (frames per
second) for the whole rendering (surface subdivision
+ assignment of color) of the multiresolution objects
for one and two levels of subdivision, whereas the re-
sults for the whole scenes for two iterations are 530
and 260 fps, respectively for Teatime and Chesstime.
FPS have been measured for the worst case, that
is, when all the multiresolution objects are rendered.
As can be observed, real time rendering has been
achieved in all the cases, and the differences in ren-
dering time between the two scenes are due to the
number of primitives to process in both cases.
5 CONCLUSIONS
An efficient GPU implementation of the Loop sur-
face subdivision scheme has been presented in this
work. This implementation has been integrated in a
multiresolution system, mapping the color results ob-
tained from global illumination in the subdivided ob-
jects. Among the different options analyzed for per-
forming tessellation on a GPU, we have opted for
using the geometry shader. Even so, our proposal
is recomputation-based, so many redundant compu-
tations are made because of the geometry shader con-
straint that does not allow the synchronization among
tasks. However, these redundant computations does
not deteriorate the performance, as have been shown.
Furthermore, an analysis of three different options
for accessing the necessary neighboring information
in the geometry shader has been done. As a result,
directly passing data though vertex buffer has got the
best results since most of the accesses to texture mem-
ory are avoided. Our implementation achieves a great
performance, rendering all the test scenes in real time.
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