Fast Rendering of Large Crowds Using GPU

This paper proposes a fast rendering algorithm for real-time animation of large crowds, which is essential for video games with a large number of non-player characters. The proposed approach leaves the minimal work of rendering to CPU, and makes GPU take all the major work, including LOD assignment and view frustum culling, which have been the typical tasks of CPU. By offloading the rendering overhead from CPU, the approach enables the CPU to perform intensive computations for crowd simulation. The experiments show that tens of thousands of characters can be skin-animated in real time.