Maintaining constant frame rates in 3D texture-based volume rendering

3D texture-based volume rendering is a popular way of realizing direct volume visualization on graphics hardware. However, the slice-oriented texture memory layout of many current CPUs may lead to a strongly view-dependent performance, which reduces the fields of application of volume rendering. In this short technical note, we propose a slight modification of texture-based volume rendering that maintains roughly constant frame rates on any GPU architecture. The idea is to split the volume into smaller sub-volumes. These bricks can be oriented in different directions; thus the varying performance for different viewing directions is averaged out