Realtime Isosurface Extraction with Graphics Hardware

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a method for the display of isosurfaces extracted from unstructured tetrahedral grids. Our algorithm completely runs on the graphics hardware. The tetrahedra are streamed into a vertex program, which extracts the surface for the given isovalue and immediately renders it. The triangles are not stored explicitly but are computed during rendering time, so the user can modify the isovalue with immediate feedback. If the tetrahedra entirely fit into video memory, we achieve a throughput of more than nine million tetrahedra per second. Our performance can be further improved by using a hybrid method which pre-selects tetrahedra containing the isovalue. We compare our approach with a pure CPU based implementation which achieves about half the performance of our hardware accelerated method.