Eliminating CPU overhead for on-the-fly content adaptation with MPEG-4 wavelet subdivision surfaces

3D content, such as X3D/VRML and MPEG-4, is transported over a lot of different networks to many different terminals. The differences in bandwidth and performance are typically coped with compressed multi-resolution content: e.g. MPEG-4 wavelet subdivision surfaces (WSS). WSS geometry has a very good compression, but suffers from a high CPU overhead when it is used for fine-grained on-the-fly adaptations of the geometry in execution time regulated applications, e.g. networked interactive 3D games. This paper therefore presents a new content adaptation method for WSS geometry which drastically frees the CPU for other application tasks. The proposed method has a minimal impact on the execution time of the graphical processing unit (10% increase) despite its extra memory requirements (68% compared to single resolution geometry) and its decreased post T&L cache efficiency.