GPU Pathfinding Optimization

Abstract

In recent years, GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) have shown a significant advance of computational resources available for the use of non-graphical applications. The ability to solve problems involving parallel computing as well as the development of new architectures that supports this new paradigm, such as CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), have encouraged the use of GPU for general purpose applications, especially in games. Some parallel tasks which were CPU (Central Processing Unit) based are being ported over to the GPU due to theirs superior performance. One of these tasks is the path finding of an agent over a game map, which has already achieved a better performance on GPU, but is still limited. This paper describes some optimizations to a GPU path finding implementation, addressing larger work set (agents and nodes) with good performance.