Sequential point trees

Figure 1: Continuous detail levels of a Buddha generated in vertex programs on the GPU. The colors denote the LOD level used and the bars describe the selected amount of points selected for the GPU (top row) and the average CPU load required for rendering (bottom row). In this paper we present sequential point trees, a data structure that allows adaptive rendering of point clouds completely on the graphics processor. Sequential point trees are based on a hierarchical point representation, but the hierarchical rendering traversal is replaced by sequential processing on the graphics processor, while the CPU is available for other tasks. Smooth transition to triangle rendering for optimized performance is integrated. We describe optimizations for backface culling and texture adaptive point selection. Finally, we discuss implementation issues and show results