GPU-Driven LOD Rendering in Vulkan

This text examines efficient rasterization of large-scale 3D models in real time with the main focus being on levels of detail (LOD). After a brief summary of existing techniques, the work contains a design and implementation of a 3D renderer for polygonal meshes that uses a hierarchical LOD structure. The renderer preprocesses an input OBJ mesh into a graph of meshlets. Using modern GPU features such as task and mesh shaders, the renderer enables real-time navigation and view-dependent LOD selection. The renderer is then evaluated on 20 meshes of various complexity and the results show that frame time is approximately halved on average without causing any major visual artifacts. Further investigation suggests that with a better simplification and meshlet grouping algorithm, the performance increase could be even greater.