Accurate and Memory-Efficient GPU Ray-Casting Algorithm for Volume Rendering Unstructured Grid Data

Gu, Gibeom; Kim, Duksu

Accurate and Memory-Efficient GPU Ray-Casting Algorithm for Volume Rendering Unstructured Grid Data

Files

077-079.pdf (508.75 KB)

Date

2019

Authors

Gu, Gibeom
Kim, Duksu

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We present a novel GPU ray-casting algorithm for volume rendering unstructured grid data. We employ the per-pixel intersection list to guarantee accurate results for non-convex meshes. For efficient memory access for the lists on the GPU, we represent the intersection lists for all faces as an array. To increase ray-coherency in a thread block and improve memory access efficiency, we propose an image-tile based ray distribution method. Also, we found that a prior approach using a per-thread local buffer to reduce redundant computation is not proper for recent GPUs. Instead, we use an on-demand calculation strategy that achieves much better performance even when it allows duplicate computation. With a GPU, our method achieved up to 36.5 times higher performance for the ray-casting process, and 18.1 times higher performance for the entire volume rendering, compared with the Bunyk algorithm using a CPU core. Also, our approach showed up to 8.2 times higher performance than a GPU-based cell projection method while generating more accurate rendering results.

        @inproceedings{10.2312:eurp.20191150
,
booktitle = {EuroVis 2019 - Posters
},
editor = {Madeiras Pereira, João and Raidou, Renata Georgia
},
title = {{Accurate and Memory-Efficient GPU Ray-Casting Algorithm for Volume Rendering Unstructured Grid Data
}},
author = {Gu, Gibeom and 
Kim, Duksu
},
year = {2019
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-088-8
},
DOI = {10.2312/eurp.20191150
}
}