Hardware-Assisted High-Efficiency Ray Casting of Unstructured Time-Varying Flows Using Temporal Coherence
College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, China
International Multiconference of Engineers and Computer Scientists (IMECS), 2011
@article{ma2011hardware,
title={Hardware-Assisted High-Efficiency Ray Casting of Unstructured Time-Varying Flows Using Temporal Coherence},
author={Ma, Q. and Zeng, L. and Xu, H. and Wang, W. and Li, S.},
journal={Proceedings of the International MultiConference of Engineers and Computer Scientists},
volume={2},
year={2011}
}
Advances in computational power are enabling high-precision numerical simulations of unsteady flows using unstructured grids. The dynamic ray casting technique with the aid of texture hardware can achieve high-accuracy volume rendering of unstructured time-varying data from these simulations. However, the existing approach does not pay enough attention to temporal coherence, which depresses the rendering rate. Besides this, the texture structure used to store the mesh data results in a waste of GPU memory, which limits the mesh scale of the rendering data. This paper presents a high-efficiency dynamic ray casting algorithm for rendering unstructured time-varying fields using temporal coherence. Meanwhile, the pressure of GPU memory is effectually reduced by a well-designed texture structure. The analysis and experiments demonstrate that our approach gains a much lower cost of both time and space than the existing method and allows rendering time-varying data on a larger mesh scale in real time.
December 31, 2011 by hgpu
