Testing of Vulkan Visualization for Geo-Models on Mobile Devices and Desktop Systems with Ray Tracing GPUs

Maksat Mustafin, Olzhas Nurkonysuly Turar, Darkhan Akhmed-Zaki

2020

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DOI 10.3997/2214-4609.202035172
Data confidence 70 medium
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Abstract

Summary The paper describes development and comparison tests for high performance visualization of geological models on different platforms. It’s motivated by paradigm of ubiquitous computations using distributed systems where any device can potentially act as platform of client interface for the simulator. Nowadays most of mobile devices have valuable computational resources and thus may be used as platform for scientific computations. So, we present visualization of geological models given in the eclipse format for mobile devices. For rendering we applied standard rasterization pipeline of Vulkan framework with direct coloring of polygons based on numerical values of physical parameters. Such approach leads to necessity of the whole buffer substitution in cases of changing values in new time steps. For this purpose, we implemented double buffering algorithm for vertex buffers used to store color data. To test the performance of visualization comparisons were made based on real time rendering frames per second for geological model differing in cell count. Also, we implemented and tested geological model visualization performance on advanced desktop stations with leading GPU devices with the implementation of Ray Tracing algorithms. Even though ray tracing algorithm was invented for photorealistic visualization it can show drastic increase of rendering performance due to logarithmic complexity of intersection search algorithms. Because of that it was expected that ray tracing algorithm will show better performance on grid models with high number of cells. In the case of small grids its performance will be lower than performance of rasterization algorithm but its irrelevant due to the overall quickness of such visualization. Tests shown in the paper mostly confirm that expectations. However, in such comparisons certain additional moments must be considered. Performance of ray tracing algorithm is based on the number of screen fragments or pixels alongside with the number of primitives on the screen. Also, it affects pixel number, or, in other words, percentage of screen, covered by the model. Thus, we show different tests that consider that feature.