A low-cost memory architecture for PCI-based interactive ray casting
Michael Doggett, Michael Meißner, U. Kanus · 1999
In this paper we present a low-cost memory architecture running at 100 MHz which is suited for any PCI-based volume rendering accelerator using the ray-casting approach.Current SDRAM technology, parallel access to all voxels required for trilinear interpolation, a cubic addressing scheme, and a buffering mechanism accommodating memory latency are applied to achieve high frame-rates.A total of four off-the-shelf standard DIMM modules are required enabling up to 9 Hz (averaged over a representative set of views) for datasets of 2563 voxels, using early ray termination as the only algorithmic optimization.The presented memory architecture is a good balance of cost versus feasibility on a standard PC1 card -accepting data replicationand will be used for the VIZARD II ray casting accelerator.