Master's Thesis - Studierstube Augmented Reality Project - Graz ...

2.2 Advanced Graphics Processing
applied to bring out or suppress several important or fewer interesting areas of the 3D
texture. Volume rendering techniques as describes in section 2.1.1.1 can here be applied
as well, for example setting a transfer function. Figure 2.15(c) shows an applicatory
example of such an approach from [Interrante1998].
(a) A LIC texture from
[Cabral1993] of a fluid dynamics
field multiplied by a color
image.
(b) A PLIC evaluated dataset
colored by the underlying
velocity magnitude from
[Vivek1999].
(c) Flow simulation with
interactive settable transfer
function and clipping plane
[Interrante1998].
Figure 2.15: A comparison between examples of different dense flow vector field representations.
The algorithms introduced so far can be directly implemented on graphics hardware.
Depending on the complexity such an approach will provide a certain speedup
in contrast to implementations on a CPU. How graphics hardware can be programmed
to execute algorithms which are actually intended to be used on a CPU is described in
the next section.
2.2 Advanced Graphics Processing
Today’s personal computers are, even without 3D-acceleration cards, high-end graphics
work stations compared to specialized hardware from 1982. The next sections will
illuminate the newest available Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and the principals
of performing general purpose computations using this hardware unit. The reader is
referred to [GbR2007] 1 for a deeper insight into hardware issues. [GLSL2004; Cg2007;
Pharr2005; FernGPU2004] will provide hints and definitions for programming on a
GPU.
1 and to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics card
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