High-quality pre-integrated volume rendering using hardware-accelerated pixel shading

Abstract

We introduce a novel texture-based volume rendering approach that achieves the image quality of the best post-shading approaches with far less slices. It is suitable for new flexible consumer graphics hardware and provides high image quality even for low-resolution volume data and non-linear transfer functions with high frequencies, without the performance overhead caused by rendering additional interpolated slices. This is especially useful for volumetric effects in computer games and professional scientific volume visualization, which heavily depend on memory bandwidth and rasterization power.We present an implementation of the algorithm on current programmable consumer graphics hardware using multi-textures with advanced texture fetch and pixel shading operations. We implemented direct volume rendering, volume shading, arbitrary number of isosurfaces, and mixed mode rendering. The performance does neither depend on the number of isosurfaces nor the definition of the transfer functions, and is therefore suited for interactive high-quality volume graphics.