A Low-Cost Memory Architecture For PCI-Based Interactive Ray Casting

Doggett, Michael; Meißner, Michael; Kanust, Urs

A Low-Cost Memory Architecture For PCI-Based Interactive Ray Casting

Files

007-014.pdf (1.07 MB)

Date

1999

Authors

Doggett, Michael
Meißner, Michael
Kanust, Urs

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

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.

        @inproceedings{10.2312:EGGH/EGGH99/007-014
,
booktitle = {SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware
},
editor = {A. Kaufmann and W. Strasser and S. Molnar and B.- O. Schneider
},
title = {{A Low-Cost Memory Architecture For PCI-Based Interactive Ray Casting
}},
author = {Doggett, Michael and 
Meißner, Michael and 
Kanust, Urs
},
year = {1999
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3471
},
ISBN = {1-58113-170-4
},
DOI = {10.2312/EGGH/EGGH99/007-014
}
}