high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

We describe an approach to render massive urban models. To prevent a memory transfer bottleneck we propose to render the models from a compressed representation directly. Our solution is based on rendering crude building outlines as polygons and generating details by ray-tracing displacement maps in the fragment shader. We demonstrate how to compress a displacement map so that a decompression algorithm can selectively and quickly access individual entries in a fragment shader. Our prototype implementation shows how a massive urban model can be compressed by a factor of 85 and outperform a basic geometry-based renderer by a factor of 50 to 80 in rendering speed.