high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

Virtual environments for interactive applications demand highly realistic scenarios, which tend to be large and densely populated with very detailed meshes. Despite the outstanding evolution of graphics hardware, current GPUs are still not capable of managing these vast amounts of geometry. A solution to overcome this problem is the use of level-of-detail techniques, which recently have been oriented towards the exploitation of GPUs. Nevertheless, although some solutions present very good results, they are usually based on complex data structures and algorithms. We thus propose a new multiresolution model based on triangles which is simple and efficient. The main idea is to modify the list of vertices when changing to a new level of detail, in contrast to previous models which modify the index list, which simplifies the extraction process. This feature also provides a perfect framework for adapting the algorithm to work completely on the GPU.