Virtual Texturing using CUDA

I’m Charles-Fredrik Hollemeersch and am currently working as a researcher at Multimedia Lab. Our contribution to GPU pro shows how virtual texturing can be accelerated using CUDA by offloading many tasks to the GPU. Virtual texturing is a promising technique to improve the visual quality of real-time rendering applications such as simulations and games. By selectively loading parts of the texture dataset, virtual texturing allows for higher resolution textures than possible with traditional techniques. However, this technique also adds a significant overhead to the renderer. First, there is the task of determining the working set of the current frame. Secondly, there is the need to upload and convert the streamed data.

Luckily, these tasks lend themselves well to data-parallel execution on a GPU. In our chapter we will show how all these tasks can efficiently be executed on the GPU though a combination of CUDA and OpenGL based steps.