T. Akenine-Mller, M. McCool (Editors) Abstract UberFlow A GPU-Based Particle Engine.pdf

Graphics Hardware (2004) T. Akenine-M?ller, M. McCool (Editors) UberFlow: A GPU-Based Particle Engine Peter Kipfer, Mark Segal, Rüdiger Westermann Computer Graphics Visualization, Technische Universit?t München? , ATI Research? Abstract We present a system for real-time animation and rendering of large particle sets using GPU computation and memory objects in OpenGL. Memory objects can be used both as containers for geometry data stored on the graphics card and as render targets, providing an effective means for the manipulation and rendering of particle data on the GPU. To fully take advantage of this mechanism, efficient GPU realizations of algorithms used to perform particle manipulation are essential. Our system implements a versatile particle engine, including inter-particle collisions and visibility sorting. By combining memory objects with floating-point fragment programs, we have implemented a particle engine that entirely avoids the transfer of particle data at run-time. Our system can be seen as a forerunner of a new class of graphics algorithms, exploiting memory objects or similar concepts on upcoming graphics hardware to avoid bus bandwidth becoming the major performance bottleneck. Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism 1. Introduction From a conceptual point of view, a particle engine consists of a set of connected components or modules responsible for the creation, manipulation and rendering of particle prim- itives [Ree83, LT93, BW97, McA00, Sim90]. In computer graphics, particle engines are most commonly used to gener- ate volumetric effects like fire, explosions, smoke or fluids, based on simple physical models. More elaborate particle engines are employed for physically based dynamics sim- ulation (e.g. Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics [Mon88], Boltzmann models [Boo90, Doo90]). Such systems usually integrate particle-particle interactions as well as more com- pl