Interactive out-of-core visualisation

Abstract

The increase in computational and storage capabilities of modern-day computers together with the ubiquity of acquisition devices such as cameras, have fuelled the need for the interactive visualisation of ever more complex datasets that are many times larger than the available memory of a typical desktop machine. In this work, we present an approach to interactive out-of-core visualisation. In the proposed method, spatially coherent geometric primitives are grouped together into cells and the memory footprint during the visualisation process is reduced to the aggregate size of the required cells to render a particular frame. When this exceeds the size of the available GPU memory, cells are swapped in and out based on a least-recently-used eviction policy. Results show that the out-of-core solution incurs minimal realisation penalties. The out-of-core ray tracer achieved 10fps for the out-of-core model on a commodity hardware infrastructure.