Volume rendering with Marching cubes and async compute

Abstract: With the addition of the compute shader stage for GPGPU hardware it has becomepossible to run CPU like programs on modern GPU hardware. The greatest benefit can be seen for algorithms that are of highly parallel nature and in the case of volume rendering the Marching cubes algorithm makes for a great candidate due to its simplicity and parallel nature. For this thesis the Marching cubes algorithm was implemented on a compute shader and used in a DirectX 12 framework to determine if GPU frametime performance can be improved by executing the compute command queue parallell to the graphics command queue. Results from performance benchmarks show that a gain is present for each benchmarked configuration and the largest gains are seen for smaller workloads with up to 52%. This information could therefore prove useful for game developers who want to improve framerates or decrease development time but also in other fields such as volume rendering for medical images.