Rendering higher order finite element surfaces in hardware

• Authors: Rahul Khardekar;David Thompson
• Venue: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia
• Year: 2003

Graphics hardware is becoming flexible enough to move more than just the traditional rendering pipeline off the CPU and onto the graphics card. We demonstrate a technique for rendering nonlinear (quadratic in our case) finite element boundaries, deflected by a vector field value and colored by a scalar field value. Simple performance measurements indicate that moving field value interpolation to the graphics card results yields roughly 50% speedup, however current hardware limits the color precision of the output. Finally, we discuss approaches to circumvent precision problems and other limitations using next generation hardware.