Real-time Forest Simulation for a Flight Simulator using a GPU; Graphics Card Acceleration

This paper concerns the real-time simulation of forests for a flight simulator, exploiting the capacities of recent graphics cards. As we will show, these architectures coupled with recent ergonomic environments like CUDA allow C-programmers to implement highly parallelizable algorithms to be executed on GPU, without being specialized in parallel programming. The first results exhibited are quite encouraging and promote these technologies. The algorithm devised can display forests with different tree densities, with performances near real -time, for scenes with about one million trees.