Hardware-Accelerated Visualization of Time-Varying 2D and 3D Vector Fields by Texture Advection via Programmable Per-Pixel Operations
Daniel Weiskopf, Matthias Hopf, Thomas Ertl · 2001
We present hardware-accelerated texture advection techniques to visualize the motion of particles in steady or time-varying vector fields given on Cartesian grids. We propose an implementation of 2D texture advection which exploits advanced and programmable texture fetch and per-pixel blending operations on an nVidia GeForce 3. For 3D vector field visualization, we present an algorithm for SGI's VPro, based on pixel textures and 3D textures. Moreover, we sketch how 3D texture advection could be implemented on future graphics boards that provide programmable fetch operations for 3D textures. Since all implementations exclusively use graphics hardware without intermediate data transfer to main memory, extremely high frame rates are achieved, e.g., up to 90 frames per second for advecting a calculatory number of one million particles in a 2D flow. The proposed techniques are especially useful for the interactive visualization of vector fields. 1