Real-Time Procedural Generation with GPU Work Graphs
Bastian Kuth1, Max Oberberger2, Carsten Faber1, Dominik Baumeister2, Matthäus G. Chajdas2, Quirin Meyer1
1Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts 2AMD
Accepted to High-Performance Graphics 2024, Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. Won best paper award.
Abstract
We present a system for real-time procedural generation that makes use of the novel GPU programming model, work graphs. The nodes of a work graph are shaders, which dynamically generate new workloads for connected nodes. This greatly simplifies the implementation of recursive procedural algorithms on GPU s. Combined with GPU ray tracing and procedural mesh shaders, our system makes use of this graph structure to tackle various common problems of procedural generation. Our system is very easy to implement, requiring no additional data structures from what would already be available in a modern rendering engine. We demonstrate the real-time editing capabilities on representative examples. We augment the scene in the teaser image with 79,710 instances in 3.74 ms on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX.