An Analysis of Region Clustered BVH Volume Rendering on GPU

Abstract

We present a Direct Volume Rendering method that makes use of newly available Nvidia graphics hardware for Bounding Volume Hierarchies. Using BVHs for DVR has been overlooked in recent research due to build times potentially impeding interactive rates. We indicate that this is not necessarily the case, especially when a clustering algorithm is applied before the BVH build to reduce leaf-node complexity. Our results show substantial render time improvements for full-resolution DVR on GPU in comparison to a recent state-of-the-art approach for empty-space-skipping. Furthermore, the use of a BVH for DVR allows seamless integration into popular surface-based path-tracing technologies like Nvidia's OptiX.