A genetic texture packing algorithm on a graphical processing unit

Interactively modeled virtual scenes usu-ally contain hundreds of single separate tex-tures. A common task to prepare these scenes for real-time rendering is to compile the set of many textures into one large tex-ture which is better suited to be handled by modern graphics hardware. We present an approach for accomplish-ing the above task automatically. First, a patchwork of near-optimal compactness is calculated through a genetic algorithm (GA), second — since “GA are slow ” — we implement the genetic algorithm on a GPU and show that it easily outperforms a stan-dard CPU implementation