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Hardware‐Assisted Projected Tetrahedra
Author(s) -
Maximo A.,
Marroquim R.,
Farias R.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
computer graphics forum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.578
H-Index - 120
eISSN - 1467-8659
pISSN - 0167-7055
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01673.x
Subject(s) - shader , computer science , rendering (computer graphics) , computer graphics (images) , graphics pipeline , tetrahedron , graphics hardware , vertex (graph theory) , real time rendering , software rendering , general purpose computing on graphics processing units , volume rendering , computational science , cuda , isosurface , graphics , parallel computing , artificial intelligence , graph , 3d computer graphics , theoretical computer science , geometry , mathematics , visualization
We present a flexible and highly efficient hardware‐assisted volume renderer grounded on the original Projected Tetrahedra (PT) algorithm. Unlike recent similar approaches, our method is exclusively based on the rasterization of simple geometric primitives and takes full advantage of graphics hardware. Both vertex and geometry shaders are used to compute the tetrahedral projection, while the volume ray integral is evaluated in a fragment shader; hence, volume rendering is performed entirely on the GPU within a single pass through the pipeline. We apply a CUDA‐based visibility ordering achieving rendering and sorting performance of over 6 M Tet/s for unstructured datasets. Furthermore, as each tetrahedron is processed independently, we employ a data‐parallel solution which is neither bound by GPU memory size nor does it rely on auxiliary volume information. In addition, iso‐surfaces can be readily extracted during the rendering process, and time‐varying data are handled without extra burden.