EGGH99: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 1999

Permanent URI for this collection

https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/336

Browse

Browsing EGGH99: SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 1999 by Subject "1.3.3 [Computer Graphics]"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Hybrid Volume and Polygon Rendering with Cube Hardware
    (The Eurographics Association, 1999) Kreeger, Kevin; Kaufman, Arie; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.- O. Schneider
    We present two methods which connect today s polygon graphics hardware accelerators to Cube-5 volume rendering hardware, the successor to Cube4 The proposed methods allow mixing of both opaque and translucent polygons with volumes on PC class machines, while ensuring the correct compositing order of all objects. Both implementations connect the two hardware acceleration subsystems at the frame buffer. One shares a common DRAM buffer and one run-length encodes images of thin slabs of polygonal data and then combines them in the Cube composite buffer In both realizations, we take advantage of the predictable ordered access to frame buffer storage that is utilized by Cube-5 and the rest of the family of volume rendering accelerators based on the Cube design.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    A Low-Cost Memory Architecture For PCI-Based Interactive Ray Casting
    (The Eurographics Association, 1999) Doggett, Michael; Meißner, Michael; Kanust, Urs; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.- O. Schneider
    In this paper we present a low-cost memory architecture running at 100 MHz which is suited for any PCI-based volume rendering accelerator using the ray-casting approach. Current SDRAM technology, parallel access to all voxels required for trilinear interpolation, a cubic addressing scheme, and a buffering mechanism accommodating memory latency are applied to achieve high frame-rates. A total of four off-the-shelf standard DIMM modules are required enabling up to 9 Hz (averaged over a representative set of views) for datasets of 2563 voxels, using early ray termination as the only algorithmic optimization. The presented memory architecture is a good balance of cost versus feasibility on a standard PC1 card - accepting data replication - and will be used for the VIZARD II ray casting accelerator.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    TRIANGLECASTER Extensions To 3BTexturing Units For Accelerated Volume Rendering
    (The Eurographics Association, 1999) Knittel, Gunter; A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.- O. Schneider
    We discuss hardware extensions to 3D-texturing units, which are very small but nevertheless remove some substantial performance limits typically found when using a 3D-texturing unit for volume rendering. The underlying algorithm uses only a slight modification of existing method, which limits negative impacts on application software. In particular, the method speeds up the compositing operation, improves texture cache eflciency and allows for early ray termination and empty space skipping. Early ray termination can not be used in the traditional approach. Simulations show that, depending on data set properties, the performance of readily available, low-cost PC graphics accelerators is already suflcient for real-time volume visualization. Thus, in terms ofperformance, the TRIANGLECASTER-extensions can make dedicated volume rendering accelerators unnecessary.