GPU-based hierarchical computations for view independent visibility

With rapid improvements in the performance and programmability, graphics processing units (GPUs) have fostered considerable interest in substantially reducing the running time of compute intensive problems. The solution to the view-independent mutual point-pair visibility problem (required for inter-reflections in global illumination) can, it would seem, require the capabilities of the GPUs. In this paper, various ways of parallelizing the construction of the visibility map (V-map, a description of mutual visibility) are presented to lead the way for an implementation that achieves a speedup of 11 or more. We evaluate our scheme qualitatively and quantitatively, and conclude that parallelizing the V-map construction algorithm is eminently useful.© IEE