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Computational Visual Media 2017, 3(4): 349-357 https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0093-5
Research Article | Open Access | Issue | Published: 05 August 2017

Z2 traversal order:An interleaving approach for VR stereo rendering on tile-based GPUs

Show Author's Information Jae-Ho Nah1,  Yeongkyu Lim1( ),  Sunho Ki1,  Chulho Shin1
LG Electronics, 19, Yangjae-daero 11-gil, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Keywords:
virtual reality (VR), tile traversal order, tile-based GPU, mobile GPU, graphics hardware
Cite this article:
Nah J-H, Lim Y, Ki S, et al. Z2 traversal order:An interleaving approach for VR stereo rendering on tile-based GPUs. Computational Visual Media, 2017, 3(4): 349-357. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41095-017-0093-5
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Abstract Full text About this article

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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About this article

Z2 traversal order:An interleaving approach for VR stereo rendering on tile-based GPUs

Show Author's information Jae-Ho Nah1, Yeongkyu Lim1( ), Sunho Ki1, Chulho Shin1
LG Electronics, 19, Yangjae-daero 11-gil, Seocho-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

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.

Keywords: virtual reality (VR), tile traversal order, tile-based GPU, mobile GPU, graphics hardware

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Publication history
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Acknowledgements
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Publication history

Revised: 11 April 2017
Accepted: 12 July 2017
Published: 05 August 2017
Issue date: December 2017

Copyright

© The Author(s) 2017

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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