Packing vertex data into hardware-decompressible textures

Abstract

Most graphics hardware features memory to store textures and vertex data for rendering. However, because of the irreversible trend of increasing complexity of scenes, rendering a scene can easily reach the limit of memory resources. Thus, vertex data are preferably compressed, with a requirement that they can be decompressed during rendering. In this paper, we present a novel method to exploit existing hardware texture compression circuits to facilitate the decompression of vertex data in graphics processing unit (GPUs). This built-in hardware allows real-time, random-order decoding of data. However, vertex data must be packed into textures, and careless packing arrangements can easily disrupt data coherence. Hence, we propose an optimization approach for the best vertex data permutation that minimizes compression error. All of these result in fast and high-quality vertex data decompression for real-time rendering. To further improve the visual quality, we introduce vertex clustering to reduce the dynamic range of data during quantization. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for various vertex data of 3D models during rendering with the advantages of a minimized memory footprint and high frame rate.