The acceleration of 3D graphics transformations based on CUDA

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to achieve the acceleration of 3D object transformation using parallel techniques such as multi-core central processing unit (MC CPU) or graphic processing unit (GPU) or even both. Generating 3D animation scenes in computer graphics requires applying a 3D transformation on the vertices of the objects. These transformations consume most of the execution time. Hence, for high-speed graphic systems, acceleration of vertex transform is very much sought for because it requires many matrix operations (need) to be performed in a real time, so the execution time is essential for such processing.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, the acceleration of 3D object transformation is achieved using parallel techniques such as MC CPU or GPU or even both. Multiple geometric transformations are concatenated together at a time in any order in an interactive manner.

Findings

The performance results are presented for a number of 3D objects with paralleled implementations of the affine transform on the NVIDIA GPU series. The maximum execution time was about 0.508 s to transform 100 million vertices using LabVIEW and 0.096 s using Visual Studio. Other results also showed the significant speed-up compared to CPU, MC CPU and other previous work computations for the same object complexity.

Originality/value

The high-speed execution of 3D models is essential in many applications such as medical imaging, 3D games and robotics.

Citation

Nawfal, S. and Ali, F. (2018), "The acceleration of 3D graphics transformations based on CUDA", Journal of Engineering, Design and Technology, Vol. 16 No. 6, pp. 925-937. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEDT-04-2018-0072