Browsing by Author "Schmalstieg, Dieter"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Fast Multi-View Rendering for Real-Time Applications
    (The Eurographics Association, 2020) Unterguggenberger, Johannes; Kerbl, Bernhard; Steinberger, Markus; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Wimmer, Michael; Frey, Steffen and Huang, Jian and Sadlo, Filip
    Efficient rendering of multiple views can be a critical performance factor for real-time rendering applications. Generating more than one view multiplies the amount of rendered geometry, which can cause a huge performance impact. Minimizing that impact has been a target of previous research and GPU manufacturers, who have started to equip devices with dedicated acceleration units. However, vendor-specific acceleration is not the only option to increase multi-view rendering (MVR) performance. Available graphics API features, shader stages and optimizations can be exploited for improved MVR performance, while generally offering more versatile pipeline configurations, including the preservation of custom tessellation and geometry shaders. In this paper, we present an exhaustive evaluation of MVR pipelines available on modern GPUs. We provide a detailed analysis of previous techniques, hardware-accelerated MVR and propose a novel method, leading to the creation of an MVR catalogue. Our analyses cover three distinct applications to help gain clarity on overall MVR performance characteristics. Our interpretation of the observed results provides a guideline for selecting the most appropriate one for various use cases on different GPU architectures.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Hierarchical Bucket Queuing for Fine‐Grained Priority Scheduling on the GPU
    (© 2017 The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017) Kerbl, Bernhard; Kenzel, Michael; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Seidel, Hans‐Peter; Steinberger, Markus; Chen, Min and Zhang, Hao (Richard)
    While the modern graphics processing unit (GPU) offers massive parallel compute power, the ability to influence the scheduling of these immense resources is severely limited. Therefore, the GPU is widely considered to be only suitable as an externally controlled co‐processor for homogeneous workloads which greatly restricts the potential applications of GPU computing. To address this issue, we present a new method to achieve fine‐grained priority scheduling on the GPU: hierarchical bucket queuing. By carefully distributing the workload among multiple queues and efficiently deciding which queue to draw work from next, we enable a variety of scheduling strategies. These strategies include fair‐scheduling, earliest‐deadline‐first scheduling and user‐defined dynamic priority scheduling. In a comparison with a sorting‐based approach, we reveal the advantages of hierarchical bucket queuing over previous work. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of using priority scheduling in real‐world applications by example of path tracing and foveated micropolygon rendering.While the modern graphics processing unit (GPU) offers massive parallel compute power, the ability to influence the scheduling of these immense resources is severely limited. Therefore, the GPU is widely considered to be only suitable as an externally controlled co‐processor for homogeneous workloads which greatly restricts the potential applications of GPU computing. To address this issue, we present a new method to achieve fine‐grained priority scheduling on the GPU: hierarchical bucket queuing. By carefully distributing the workload among multiple queues and efficiently deciding which queue to draw work from next, we enable a variety of scheduling strategies. These strategies include fair‐scheduling, earliest‐deadline‐first scheduling and user‐defined dynamic priority scheduling.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    PSAO: Point-Based Split Rendering for Ambient Occlusion
    (The Eurographics Association, 2023) Neff, Thomas; Budge, Brian; Dong, Zhao; Schmalstieg, Dieter; Steinberger, Markus; Bikker, Jacco; Gribble, Christiaan
    Recent advances in graphics hardware have enabled ray tracing to produce high-quality ambient occlusion (AO) in real-time, which is not plagued by the artifacts typically found in real-time screen-space approaches. However, the high computational cost of ray tracing remains a significant hurdle for low-power devices like standalone VR headsets or smartphones. To address this challenge, inspired by point-based global illumination and texture-space split rendering, we propose point-based split ambient occlusion (PSAO), a novel split-rendering system that streams points sparsely from server to client. PSAO first evenly distributes points across the scene, and then subsequently only transmits points that changed more than a given threshold, using an efficient hash grid to blend neighboring points for the final compositing pass on the client. PSAO outperforms recent texture-space shading approaches in terms of quality and required network bit rate, while demonstrating performance similar to commonly used lower-quality screen-space approaches. Our point-based split rendering representation lends itself to highly compressible signals such as AO and is scalable towards quality or bandwidth requirements by adjusting the number of points in the scene.