Performance aspects of layered displacement blending in real time applications

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate performance aspects of layered displacement blending; a technique used to render realistic and transformable objects in real time rendering systems using the GPU. Layered displacement blending is done by blending layers of color maps and displacement maps together based on values stored in an influence map. In this thesis we construct a theoretical and practical model for layered displacement blending. The model is implemented in a test bed application to enable measuring of performance aspects. The implementation is fed input with variations in triangle count, number of subdivisions, texture size and number of layers. The execution time for these different combinations are recorded and analyzed. The recorded execution times reveal that the amount of layers associated with an object has no impact on performance. Further analysis reveals that layered displacement blending is heavily dependent on the triangle count in the input mesh. The results show that layered displacement blending is a viable option to representing transformable objects in real time applications with respect to performance. This thesis provides; a theoretical model for layered displacement blending, an implementation of the model using the GPU and measurements of that implementation