Changes from 2.1 to 2.11:
1. Minor bugfix in gradient interpolation of fragment shaders

Changes from 2.01 to 2.1:
1. Now supports ATI's Radeon8500 graphics card. Uses ATI's fragment shader OpenGL extension on the Radeon8500 and NVidia's texture shader and register combiner extensions on the GeForce3 graphics card.
2. Fixed some bugs.

Note for Radeon users:
1. Framerate decreases considerably on Radeon8500 if user interface is visible. Disable user interface via key 'o' to get full performance.
2. Use quality settings in the OpenGL driver tab (requires administrator account in Win2000).


Changes to version 2.01:
1. uses 3D textures (drivers >=14.20) automatically if available (else 2D textures), press key '3' to switch between 2D and 3D texture mode, key 'l' toggles slice polygon lines
2. Perlin noise mode: Apply perlin noise to volumetric data on-the-fly, use demo runme4, click and drag mouse around red dot of panel on bottom of screen to change parameters (more instructions soon).
3. Now also includes fireball and tooth data sets.

Abstract:
We introduce a novel texture-based volume rendering approach that
achieves the image quality of the best post-shading approaches
with far less slices. It is suitable for new flexible consumer
graphics hardware and provides high image quality even for
low-resolution volume data and non-linear transfer functions with
high frequencies, without the performance overhead caused by
rendering additional interpolated slices. This is especially
useful for volumetric effects in computer games and professional
scientific volume visualization, which heavily depend on memory
bandwidth and rasterization power.

We present an implementation of the algorithm on current
programmable consumer graphics hardware using multi-textures with
advanced texture fetch and pixel shading operations. We
implemented direct volume rendering, volume shading, arbitrary
number of isosurfaces, and mixed mode rendering. The performance
does neither depend on the number of isosurfaces nor the
definition of the transfer functions, and is therefore suited for
interactive high-quality volume graphics.

"Best paper award" on Siggraph/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2001.
Download paper (PDF)
Talk given on Graphics Hardware 2001 (PPT,PDF)

Siggraph/Eurographics Workshop on Graphics Hardware 2001