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Software Rasterization of 2 Billion Points in Real Time

Authors: Markus Schütz, Bernhard Kerbl, Michael WimmerAuthors Info & Claims
Article No.: 24, Pages 1 - 17
Published: 27 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

The accelerated collection of detailed real-world 3D data in the form of ever-larger point clouds is sparking a demand for novel visualization techniques that are capable of rendering billions of point primitives in real-time. We propose a software rasterization pipeline for point clouds that is capable of rendering up to two billion points in real-time (60 FPS) on commodity hardware. Improvements over the state of the art are achieved by batching points, enabling a number of batch-level optimizations before rasterizing them within the same rendering pass. These optimizations include frustum culling, level-of-detail (LOD) rendering, and choosing the appropriate coordinate precision for a given batch of points directly within a compute workgroup. Adaptive coordinate precision, in conjunction with visibility buffers, reduces the required data for the majority of points to just four bytes, making our approach several times faster than the bandwidth-limited state of the art. Furthermore, support for LOD rendering makes our software rasterization approach suitable for rendering arbitrarily large point clouds, and to meet the elevated performance demands of virtual reality applications.

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    Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques  Volume 5, Issue 3
    July 2022
    198 pages
    EISSN:2577-6193
    DOI:10.1145/3552302
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    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 License.

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 July 2022
    Published in PACMCGIT Volume 5, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. point cloud rendering
    2. rasterization
    3. real-time rendering
    4. virtual reality

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    • (2023)View-dependent Adaptive HLOD: real-time interactive rendering of multi-resolution modelsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGGRAPH European Conference on Visual Media Production10.1145/3626495.3626507(1-10)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
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