🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a novel and efficient method for evaluating Bézier curves and their higher-order generalizations—including surfaces, volumes, B-splines, and NURBS—on GPUs. By reformulating curve evaluation as texture lookup operations, the approach systematically leverages the GPU’s fixed-function linear texture interpolation hardware for the first time, effectively offloading computational workload from shaders to texture units. The method further enhances performance by integrating Seiler interpolation. Compared to conventional shader-based polynomial evaluation schemes, it achieves substantial speedups while preserving numerical accuracy, making it particularly well-suited for compute-constrained GPU environments.
📝 Abstract
We present a texture-based technique for evaluating Bézier curves on the GPU that leverages fixed-function linear texture interpolation hardware. By offloading curve evaluation to the texture interpolator, this approach can improve performance in compute-bound GPU workloads. The method can also be used naturally for Bézier surfaces and volumes and extends to advanced curve types such as B-splines, NURBS, and both integral and rational polynomials. We show how Seiler interpolation fits into this framework to improve efficiency. We also compare performance and accuracy against curves evaluated as polynomials in shader code.