Improving Locality for Progressive Radiosity Algorithm: A Study based on the Blocking Transformation of the Scene

Abstract

Efficient global illumination is an important challenge in computer graphics. Themain problemof these algorithms is their associated execution time and storage requirements. This is a handicap for simulating large scenes and reducing these costs is a constant research objective of the computer graphics community. In this paper we present a performance analysis of the progressive radiosity algorithm based on the blocking transformation of the scene according to a uniform partition. The data locality exploitation and the associated decrement in cache misses permit the reduction of the execution time of the algorithm. An extended analysis of the influence of the scene subdivision on the execution time requirements is presented. Because of our analysis, we conclude that important performance improvements in terms of execution time are obtained with this technique.