Special-Purpose Hardware

Due to the high computational cost of direct volume rendering, several researchers have proposed special-purpose volume rendering architectures. Most recent research has focused on accelerators for raycasting of regular datasets. Several architectures, such as VOGUE [16], VIRIM [10], VIZARD II [33], and EM-Cube [39], have been proposed. A comprehensive comparison of these architectures can be found in [44]. The EM-Cube architecture also served as a basis for the commercially available VolumePro board [41], which is capable of rendering a $512^3$ dataset at 30 frames/second.