A parallel approach for visualization of relief textures

Abstract

With the continuous increase of processing power, the graphic hardware – also called Graphic Processor Unit (GPU) – is naturally assuming most part of the rendering pipeline, leaving the Central Processor Unit (CPU) with more idle time. In order to take advantage of this when rendering relief textures, the present work proposes two approaches for the mapping of relief textures. Both methods are fully implemented on the CPU leaving the GPU responsible for the per-pixel shading effects. These approaches allow the use of CPU idle time and/or multiprocessed systems for the increase of real-time rendering quality and the inclusion of image-based representations.