High-quality point-based rendering on modern GPUs

In the last years, point-based rendering has been shown to offer the potential to outperform traditional triangle based rendering both in speed and visual quality when it comes to processing highly complex models. Existing surface splatting techniques achieve superior visual quality by proper filtering but they are still limited in rendering speed. On the other hand the increasing availability and programmability of graphics hardware lead to the development of very efficient hardware-accelerated rendering methods. However, since no filtered splats are used, these approaches trade visual quality for rendering speed. In this paper, we propose a rendering framework for point-based geometry providing high visual quality as well as efficient rendering. Our approach is based on a two-pass splatting technique with Gaussian filtering, resulting in a visual quality comparable to existing software rendering systems. Using programmable graphics hardware we delegate all expensive rendering tasks to the GPU, thereby minimizing data transfer and saving CPU resources. The proposed system renders up to 28M mid-quality or up to 10M high-quality surface splats per second on the latest graphics hardware.