Ray casting with programmable graphics hardware

Abstract

The flexible programmability introduced with the latest graphics chip generations has led to a new class of hardware-accelerated volume rendering algorithms implementing ray casting on the graphics processor. Three independent publications have presented this idea in the context of volume rendering for uniform meshes and tetrahedral meshes. This paper provides a more general survey of the topic. In reviewing the background, extracting the basic techniques and mechanisms common to all three approaches, and highlighting the differences, we hope to provide a comprehensive discussion of the subject.