
3
VI
Quadtrees on the GPU
Jonathan Dupuy, Jean-Claude Iehl,
and Pierre Poulin
3.1 Introduction
Finding an appropriate mathematical representation for objects is a fundamental
problem in computer graphics. Because they benefit from hardware acceleration,
polygon meshes provide an appealing solution and are widely adopted by both in-
teractive and high-quality renderers. But in order to maintain optimal rendering
performance, special care must be taken to guarantee that each polygon projects
into more than a few pixels. Below this limit, the Z-buffer starts aliasing, and
the rasterizer’s efficiency decreases drastically [AMD 10]. In the movie industry,
this