Aokana: A GPU-Driven Voxel Rendering Framework for Open World Games

Abstract: Voxels are among the most popular 3D geometric representations today. Due to their intuitiveness and ease-of-editing, voxels have been widely adopted in stylized games and low-cost independent games. However, the high storage cost of voxels, along with the significant time overhead associated with large-scale voxel rendering, limits the further development of open-world voxel games. In this paper, we introduce Aokana, a GPU-Driven Voxel Rendering Framework for Open World Games. Aokana is based on a Sparse Voxel Directed Acyclic Graph (SVDAG). It incorporates a Level-of-Details (LOD) mechanism and a streaming system, enabling seamless map loading as players traverse the open-world game environment. We also designed a corresponding high-performance GPU-driven voxel rendering pipeline to support real-time rendering of the voxel scenes that contain tens of billions of voxels. Aokana can be directly applied to existing game engines and easily integrated with mesh-based rendering methods, demonstrating its practical applicability in game development. Experimental evaluations show that, with increasing voxel scene resolution, Aokana can reduce memory usage by up to ninefold and achieves rendering speeds up to 4.8 times faster than those of previous state-of-the-art approaches.