Abstract
With increasing demands of virtual reality (VR) applications, efficient VR rendering techniques are becoming essential. Because VR stereo rendering has increased computational costs to separately render views for the left and right eyes, to reduce the rendering cost in VR applications, we present a novel traversal order for tile-based mobile GPU architectures: Z2 traversal order. In tile-based mobile GPU architectures, a tile traversal order that maximizes spatial locality can increase GPU cache efficiency. For VR applications, our approach improves upon the traditional Z order curve. We render corresponding screen tiles in left and right views in turn, or simultaneously, and as a result, we can exploit spatial adjacency of the two tiles. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a trace-driven hardware simulation using Mesa and a hardware simulator. Our experimental results show that Z2 traversal order can reduce external memory bandwidth requirements and increase rendering performance.
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Acknowledgements
GFXBench T-Rex, Sponza, Crytek Sponza, and Hand are courtesy of Kishonti Ltd., Marko Dabrovic, Crytek, and the Utah 3D Animation Repository, respectively. We used the Crytek Sponza scene modified by Dario Scarpa to fill a missing texture. Sam Martin gave us useful comments. We would like to appreciate the reviewers for their valuable comments.
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Jae-Ho Nah received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Science, Yonsei University in 2005, 2007, and 2012, respectively. Currently, he is a senior research engineer at LG Electronics. His research interests include ray tracing, rendering algorithms, and graphics hardware.
Yeongkyu Lim received his B.S. degree from Kyungpook National University in 1997 and his M.S. degree from the Department of Computer Science, Korea University in 1999. In 2013, he received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Republic of Korea. He has worked at LG Electronics since 1999. His research areas are embedded systems, HCI, and mobile GPU architectures and computing.
Sunho Ki is a senior research engineer at LG Electronics. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Hongik University in 2007 and 2009, respectively. His main research interest is in GPU/SoC architectures and rendering algorithms.
Chulho Shin is a research fellow at LG Electronics. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from the University of Southern California. He received his B.S. degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University. His main research interests include computing platform architectures for low power SoCs, low power CPU and GPU architectures, automated configuration optimization for SoCs, performance estimation, and high-performance VLSI implementation.
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Nah, JH., Lim, Y., Ki, S. et al. Z2 traversal order: An interleaving approach for VR stereo rendering on tile-based GPUs. Comp. Visual Media 3, 349–357 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0093-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0093-5