Efficient Visualization of Urban Simulation Data Using Modern GPUs

Visualization of simulation results in major urban areas is a difficult task. Multi-scale processes and connectivity of the urban environment may require interactive visualization of dynamic scenes with lots of objects at different scales. To visualize these scenes it is not always possible to use standard GIS systems. Wide distribution of high-performance gaming graphics cards has led to the emergence of specialized frameworks, which are able to cope with such kinds of visualization. This paper presents a framework and special algorithms that take full advantage of the GPU to render the urban simulation data over a virtual globe. The experiments on a scalability of the framework have showed that the framework is successfully deals with the visualization of up to two million moving agents and up to eight million of fixed points of interest on top of the virtual globe without detriment to smoothness of the image.