GPU-Based Volume Rendering Techniques

Volume rendering in visualization of three-dimensional data fields is the most important technique in the visualization of scientific computing.As this technique requires dealing with huge amount of data,and has a comparably complicated algorithm for image generation,usually high-end graphic workstations and special-purpose hardware are involved.The fast evolution of PC performance,especially the rapid development of programmable graphics hardware with its programmable vertex and fragment processor,has provided hardware acceleration support to realize real-time volume rendering on commodity PCs.This paper gives an overview of the visualization of scientific computing and GPU,realizes the 3-D texture volume rendering algorithm on a commodity PC.The results show that,without compromising the image quality,the rendering speed is improved.