Software Rasterization of 2 Billion Points in Real Time

Information

• Publication Type: Journal Paper with Conference Talk
• Workgroup(s)/Project(s):
  • Efficient workflow transforming large 3D point clouds to Building Information Models with user-assisted automatization
• Date: July 2022
• Journal: Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
• Volume: 5
• Open Access: yes
• Number: 3
• Location: Vancouver
• Lecturer: Markus Schütz
• ISSN: 2577-6193
• Event: High Performance Graphics 2022
• DOI: 10.1145/3543863
• Call for Papers: Call for Paper
• Pages: 17
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Conference date: 11. July 2022 – 14. July 2022
• Pages: 1 – 17
• Keywords: point-based rendering

Abstract

We propose a software rasterization pipeline for point clouds that is capable of brute-force rendering up to two billion points in real time (60fps). Improvements over the state of the art are achieved by batching points in a way that a number of batch-level optimizations can be computed before rasterizing the points within the same rendering pass. These optimizations include frustum culling, level-of-detail rendering, and choosing the appropriate coordinate precision for a given batch of points directly within a compute workgroup. Adaptive coordinate precision, in conjunction with visibility buffers, reduces the number of loaded bytes for the majority of points down to 4, thus making our approach several times faster than the bandwidth-limited state of the art. Furthermore, support for LOD rendering makes our software-rasterization approach suitable for rendering arbitrarily large point clouds, and to meet the increased performance demands of virtual reality rendering.

Additional Files and Images

Weblinks

• Entry in reposiTUm (TU Wien Publication Database)
• DOI: 10.1145/3543863

BibTeX

@article{SCHUETZ-2022-PCC,
  title =      "Software Rasterization of 2 Billion Points in Real Time",
  author =     "Markus Sch\"{u}tz and Bernhard Kerbl and Michael Wimmer",
  year =       "2022",
  abstract =   "We propose a software rasterization pipeline for point
               clouds that is capable of brute-force rendering up to two
               billion points in real time (60fps). Improvements over the
               state of the art are achieved by batching points in a way
               that a number of batch-level optimizations can be computed
               before rasterizing the points within the same rendering
               pass. These optimizations include frustum culling,
               level-of-detail rendering, and choosing the appropriate
               coordinate precision for a given batch of points directly
               within a compute workgroup. Adaptive coordinate precision,
               in conjunction with visibility buffers, reduces the number
               of loaded bytes for the majority of points down to 4, thus
               making our approach several times faster than the
               bandwidth-limited state of the art. Furthermore, support for
               LOD rendering makes our software-rasterization approach
               suitable for rendering arbitrarily large point clouds, and
               to meet the increased performance demands of virtual reality
               rendering.  ",
  month =      jul,
  journal =    "Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive
               Techniques",
  volume =     "5",
  number =     "3",
  issn =       "2577-6193",
  doi =        "10.1145/3543863",
  pages =      "17",
  publisher =  "Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)",
  pages =      "1--17",
  keywords =   "point-based rendering",
  URL =        "https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2022/SCHUETZ-2022-PCC/",
}