Fast OBJ file importing and parsing in CUDA

• Published in: Computational visual media (Beijing) Vol. 1; no. 3; pp. 229 - 238
• Main Authors: Possemiers, Aidan L., Lee, Ickjai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.09.2015; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Graphics; Computer Science; Graphics processing units; Image Processing and Computer Vision; Load resistance; Methods; Performance enhancement; Research Article; Run time (computers); User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Wave fronts; vertex buffer object (VBO); general-purpose programming on the graphics processing unit (GPGPU); compute unified device architecture (CUDA); parsing; OBJ
• ISSN: 2096-0433; 2096-0662
• DOI: 10.1007/s41095-015-0021-5

Alias-Wavefront OBJ meshes are a common text file type for transferring 3D mesh data between applications made by different vendors. However, as the mesh complexity gets higher and denser, the files become larger and slower to import. This paper explores the use of GPUs to accelerate the importing and parsing of OBJ files by studying file read-time, runtime, and load resistance. We propose a new method of reading and parsing that circumvents GPU architecture limitations and improves performance, seeing the new GPU method outperforms CPU methods with a 6× - 8× speedup. When running on a heavily loaded system, the new method only received an 80% performance hit, compared to the 160% that the CPU methods received. The loaded GPU speedup compared to unloaded CPU methods was 3.5×, and, when compared to loaded CPU methods, 8×. These results demonstrate that the time is right for further research into the use of data-parallel GPU acceleration beyond that of computer graphics and high performance computing.