Real-Time Collision Detection

Chapter 10

GPU-assisted Collision Detection

Today, commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) have advanced to a state in which more raw processing power is inherent in GPUs than in main CPUs. This development is facilitated by GPUs working in a very restricted domain, allowing rendering tasks to be parallelized across many deeply pipelined, highly specialized computational units. This parallelism gives an overall speed advantage to GPUs, even though GPUs typically work at lower clock speeds than CPUs. Coupled with recent GPU improvements, such as increased programmability of vertex and pixel shaders and the introduction of floating-point textures, the computational power of GPUs has generated a lot of interest in mapping nonrendering-related, ...