Pfister, HanspeterHardenbergh, JanKnittel, JimLauer, HughSeiler, Larry2010-06-011999Pfister, 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.0-201-48560-5http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4141472This 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.en-USgraphics hardwarehardware systemsrendering hardwarerendering systemsvolume renderingMonograph or Book2010-06-0110.1145/311535.311563