State of the Art in Mobile Volume Rendering on iOS Devices

Abstract

The ubiquity of ever-increasing computing power with mobile devices has put last generation desktop-grade hardware in everyone's palms. Mobile computing hardware is rapidly approaching today's desktop-grade hardware capabilities enabling applications of advanced rendering algorithms to previously untouched environments such as medical care. Recent developments in graphics APIs have introduced novel low-level APIs such as AMD's Mantle API for desktops and Apple's Metal API for mobile hardware. Microsoft's DirectX 12 and the OpenGL successor Vulkan will be available in the near future. AAA game titles were announced for which publishers see an advantage-as promised by the creators of the new APIs-over traditional portable implementations. The new APIs are mostly advertised to allow for more draw-calls per frame compared to for example, OpenGL-based solutions. Visualization algorithms and in particular direct volume rendering do not exhibit a significant amount of draw-calls as a bottleneck. This work evaluates and highlights the utility of recent low-level APIs for mobile devices and puts them into perspective with available alternatives.