Efficient traversal of mesh edges using adjacency primitives

Efficient traversal of mesh edges using adjacency primitives
Pedro Sander, Diego Nehab, Eden Chlamtac, Hugues Hoppe.
ACM Trans. Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia), 27(5), 2008.
Fast rendering of shadow volumes, silhouettes, and motion blur.
Abstract: Processing of mesh edges lies at the core of many advanced real-time rendering techniques, ranging from shadow and silhouette computations, to motion blur and fur rendering. We present a scheme for efficient traversal of mesh edges that builds on the adjacency primitives and programmable geometry shaders introduced in recent graphics hardware. Our scheme aims to minimize the number of primitives while maximizing SIMD parallelism. These objectives reduce to a set of discrete optimization problems on the dual graph of the mesh, and we develop practical solutions to these graph problems. In addition, we extend two existing vertex cache optimization algorithms to produce cache-efficient traversal orderings for adjacency primitives. We demonstrate significant runtime speedups for several practical real-time rendering algorithms.
Hindsights: It would be nice to extend this approach to the larger patch primitives introduced in the DirectX 11 hull shader.