high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Exploiting the powerful processing power available on the GPU in many machines, we investigate the performance of parallelised versions of pathfinding algorithms in typical game environments. We describe a parallel implementation of a collaborative diffusion algorithm that is shown to find short paths in real-time across a range of graph sizes and provide a comparison to the well known Dijkstra and A* algorithms. Although some trade-off of cost vs path-length is observed under specific environmental conditions, results show that it is a viable contender for pathfinding in typical real-time game scenarios, freeing up CPU computation for other aspects of game AI.