Acceleration Techniques for GPU-based Volume Rendering
Jens Krüger,Rüdiger Westermann
Computer Graphics and Visualization Group,Technical University Munich, Germany
Background
Nowadays, direct volume rendering via 3D textures has positioned
itself as an efficient tool for the display and visual analysis of
volumetric scalar fields. It is commonly accepted, that for
reasonably sized data sets appropriate quality at interactive
rates can be achieved by means of this technique. However, despite
these benefits one important issue has received little attention
throughout the ongoing discussion of texture based volume
rendering: the integration of acceleration techniques to reduce
per-fragment operations.
In this paper, we address the integration of early ray termination
and empty-space skipping into texture based volume rendering on
graphical processing units (GPU). Therefore, we describe volume
ray-casting on programmable graphics hardware as an alternative to
object-order approaches. We exploit the early z-test to terminate
fragment processing once sufficient opacity has been accumulated,
and to skip empty space along the rays of sight. We demonstrate
performance gains up to a factor of 3 for typical renditions of
volumetric data sets on the ATI 9700 graphics card.
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