text: Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (SAMR) is a popular numerical technique to study processes with high spatial and temporal dynamic range. It reduces computational requirements by adapting the lattice on which the underlying differential equations are solved to most efficiently represent the solution. Particularly in astrophysics and cosmology such simulations now can capture spatial scales ten orders of magnitude apart and more. The irregular locations and extensions of the refined regions in the SAMR scheme and the fact that different resolution levels partially overlap, poses a challenge for GPU-based direct volume rendering methods. kD-trees have proven to be advantageous to subdivide the data domain into non-overlapping blocks of equally sized cells, optimal for the texture units of current graphics hardware, but previous GPU-supported raycasting approaches for SAMR data using this data structure required a separate rendering pass for each node, preventing the application of many advanced lighting schemes that require simultaneous access to more than one block of cells. In this paper we present the first single-pass GPU-raycasting algorithm for SAMR data that is based on a kD-tree. The tree is efficiently encoded by a set of 3D-textures, which allows to adaptively sample complete rays entirely on the GPU without any CPU interaction. We discuss two different data storage strategies to access the grid data on the GPU and apply them to several datasets to prove the benefits of the proposed method.
  @cite_24: For volume rendering of regular grids the display of view-plane aligned slices has proven to yield both good quality and performance. In this paper we demonstrate how to merge the most important extensions of the original 3D slicing approach, namely the pre-integration technique, volumetric clipping, and advanced lighting. Our approach allows the suppression of clipping artifacts and achieves high quality while offering the fiexibility to explore volume data sets interactively with arbitrary clip objects. We also outline how to utilize the proposed volumetric clipping approach for the display of segmented data sets. Moreover, we increase the rendering quality by implementing efficient over-sampling with the pixel shader of consumer graphics accelerators. We give prove that at least 4-times over-sampling is needed to reconstruct the ray integral with sufficient accuracy even with pre-integration. As an alternative to this brute-force over-sampling approach we propose a hardware-accelerated ray caster which is able to perform over-sampling only where needed and which is able to gain additional speed by early ray termination and space leaping.
  @cite_14: Nowadays, direct volume rendering via 3D textures has positioned itself as an efficient tool for the display and visual analysis of volumetric scalar fields. It is commonly accepted, that for reasonably sized data sets appropriate quality at interactive rates can be achieved by means of this technique. However, despite these benefits one important issue has received little attention throughout the ongoing discussion of texture based volume rendering: the integration of acceleration techniques to reduce per-fragment operations. In this paper, we address the integration of early ray termination and empty-space skipping into texture based volume rendering on graphical processing units (GPU). Therefore, we describe volume ray-casting on programmable graphics hardware as an alternative to object-order approaches. We exploit the early z-test to terminate fragment processing once sufficient opacity has been accumulated, and to skip empty space along the rays of sight. We demonstrate performance gains up to a factor of 3 for typical renditions of volumetric data sets on the ATI 9700 graphics card.
  @cite_6: 
  @cite_2: In this work we present a flexible framework for GPU-based volume rendering. The framework is based on a single pass volume raycasting approach and is easily extensible in terms of new shader functionality. We demonstrate the flexibility of our system by means of a number of high-quality standard and nonstandard volume rendering techniques. Our implementation shows a promising performance in a number of benchmarks while producing images of higher accuracy than obtained by standard pre-integrated slice-based volume rendering.
summary: With the advent of programmable graphics hardware that supports flexible shader programs, it became feasible to perform the ray integration on a per-pixel basis at interactive frame rates @cite_24 @cite_14 @cite_2 . In the latter approach the data is converted to a 3D texture and a fragment shader is executed for each pixel that is covered by the projected bounding box of the data volume. The ray is parameterized in texture coordinates and the ray-integral is computed in the fragment shader. GPU-raycasting is particularly attractive for adaptive grids, as it does not suffer from the rendering artifacts inherent to slice-based methods, which can lead to visible artifacts at the interfaces between different resolution levels. GPU-raycasting has been extended to SAMR data, using a kD-tree that is traversed on the CPU and rendered node-by-node in separate rendering passes @cite_6 .