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I am curious of how the performance of color picking compares to ray casting. I am looking at the scenario when the mouse is clicked which means only then the scene is rendered in a backbuffer for color picking or ray-cating has to be applied.

Note: I have found this question which unfortunatly does not give any indication.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ What would make a satisfactory answer to your question? Also, have you tried either option and found its performance to be unsatisfactory? \$\endgroup\$
    – Seth Battin
    Jul 24, 2015 at 21:20
  • \$\begingroup\$ I have not found unsatisfactory performance for color picking and have never ever implemented ray casting. But I very often find that people use ray casting so I wondered whether this is because of performance (hence this question). A satisfactory answer could be "Reading a framebuffer is so slow that ray-casting calculations is like ~10 times faster" or "generally the performance is similar". I know there is a lot depending on details. Maybe it depends on the case, maybe ray casting is always faster becaue framebuffer reading is a true bottleneck. \$\endgroup\$
    – Sjoerd222888
    Jul 24, 2015 at 21:27
  • \$\begingroup\$ Maybe! Do you have more details about your particular scenario? \$\endgroup\$
    – Seth Battin
    Jul 24, 2015 at 21:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ A possible answer is also: "It highly depends on the scenario, no general statement can be made". This is also satisfactory (if that is the truth). In this case I am really looking for a most general statement. Though I would also be interested in how to answer depends on the case, e.g. what typical things would make one technique faster (and why). To give a scenario specif answer: what would you need to know exactly except from that it is a 3D scene with 3D objects and I want to do picking only on mouse click (not continuously). Would it depend on the number of objects? \$\endgroup\$
    – Sjoerd222888
    Jul 24, 2015 at 22:02
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    \$\begingroup\$ Ray casting maintains the same fixed cost with varying screen resolution and field of view settings. Ray casting can query your spatial partitioning scheme with a much simpler intersection geometry (A ray, instead of a trapezoid.) to find meshes which need to processed. I say "more appropriate" because it's able to take better advantage of the known information (Where the user has clicked.) to process less candidate intersections. \$\endgroup\$
    – MickLH
    Jul 25, 2015 at 23:57

1 Answer 1

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It depends on multiple factors including...

  1. How much geometry you are raycasting against (more = slower)
  2. The resolution you are rendering your color picking at (higher = slower)
  3. How you've implemented either solution (CPU raycasting? vs GPU color picking? or something else?).
  4. Resource constraints -> if your application is already CPU bound, and has plenty of GPU power to spare, doing a super efficient CPU ray cast is still going to be slower than doing an inefficient operation on the GPU.

There is a way to get an answer for your particular situation though - profile it and find out!

It's also important to note, either solution is a reasonable solution in many cases, so going one way or the other is likely not going to be a huge deal. If you aren't having performance problems, don't spend too much thought trying to choose between reasonable answers IMO!

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