Single-Seek Data Layout for Walkthrough Applications

With increasing speed of graphics rendering, the bottleneck in walkthrough applications has shifted to data transfer from secondary storage device to main memory. While techniques designed to reduce the data transfer volume and amortize the transfer cost are well-studied, the disk seek time, which is one of the most important components of the total rendering cost is not reduced explicitly. In this work, we propose an orthogonal approach to address the disk seek time bottleneck, namely single-seek data layouts. This is a solution in one end of the spectrum of solutions that guarantee an upper bound on the number of disk seeks. Using this approach, we can reduce the number of disk seeks required to load the data for any viewpoint in the scene to no more than one. We achieve this single seek layout using data redundancy. We provide a theoretical proof on the upper-bound of this redundancy factor, and analyze its trade-off with the rendering performance through an implementation that uses this data layout for walkthrough applications of datasets with hundreds of millions of triangles.