Fast Compression of Meshes for GPU Ray-Tracing

Abstract

We present a novel and expedite way to compress triangles meshes, fans and strips for ray-tracing on a GPU. Our approach improves on the state of the art by allowing the lossless compression of all connectivity information without changing the mesh configuration, while using linear time and space with the number of primitives. Furthermore, the algorithm can be run on a stream processor and any compressed primitive can be indexed in constant time, thus allowing fast random-access to geometry data to support ray-tracing on a GPU. Furthermore, both triangle and quad meshes compress particularly well, as do many type-specialized mesh structures where all primitives have an equal number of vertexes. Our results show that the compression algorithm allows storing and ray-tracing meshes with tens of millions of triangles on commodity GPUs with only 1GB of memory.