Hybrid volume and polygon rendering with cube hardware

Hybrid Volume and Polygon Rendering with Cube Hardware Kevin Kreeger and Arie Kaufman* Center for Visual Computing (CVC) and Department of Computer Science State University of New York at Stony Brook Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400 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. CR Categories: 1.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture-Graphics Processors; 1.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation-Display algorithms; 1.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism;