Publication: The VolumePro Real-Time Ray-Casting System
Open/View Files
Date
1999
Published Version
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you.
Citation
Pfister, Hanspeter, Jan Hardenbergh, Jim Knittel, Hugh Lauer, and Larry Seiler. 1999. The VolumePro real-time ray-casting system. In Proceedings of the 26th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques: August 8-13, 1999, Los Angeles, California, ed. SIGGRAPH, 251-260. New York, N.Y.: Association for Computing Machinery.
Research Data
Abstract
This paper describes VolumePro, the world’s first single-chip realtime volume rendering system for consumer PCs. VolumePro implements ray-casting with parallel slice-by-slice processing. Our discussion of the architecture focuses mainly on the rendering pipeline and the memory organization. VolumePro has hardware for gradient estimation, classification, and per-sample Phong illumination. The system does not perform any pre-processing and makes parameter adjustments and changes to the volume data immediately visible. We describe several advanced features of VolumePro, such as gradient magnitude modulation of opacity and illumination, supersampling, cropping and cut planes. The system renders 500 million interpolated, Phong illuminated, composited samples per second. This is sufficient to render volumes with up to 16 million voxels (e.g., 2563) at 30 frames per second.
Description
Other Available Sources
Keywords
graphics hardware, hardware systems, rendering hardware, rendering systems, volume rendering
Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material (LAA), as set forth at Terms of Service