Interactive PC Texture-Based Volume Rendering for Large Datasets

We present a novel technique for rendering large-scale volume datasets interactively on general purpose PC hardware. To circumvent the limited texture memory for texture based volume rendering, the dataset is partitioned into the bricks with reasonable size. The bricks are loaded to the graphics hardware dynamically and rendered using 3D texture mapping. During the rendering only one brick resides on the texture memory. Additionally, the sophisticated PC graphics hardware functionality is utilized to estimate the gradient on the fly avoiding the huge memory consumption in previous approaches. Using a prototype implementation of the algorithm, we are able to perform fast data loading and interactive visualization for the large datasets on a single standard PC