Real-Time Mesh Simplification Using the GPU

Recent advances in real-time rendering have allowed the GPU implementation of traditionally CPU-restricted algorithms, often with performance increases of an order of magnitude or greater. Such gains are achieved by leveraging the large-scale parallelism of the GPU towards applications that are well-suited for these streaming architectures. By contrast, mesh simplification has traditionally been viewed as a non-interactive process not readily amenable to GPU acceleration. This paper demonstrates how it becomes practical for real-time use through our method, and that the use of the GPU even for offline simplification leads to significant increases in performance.