This paper surveys several special purpose architectures that seek to render volumes at interactive rates. These specialized visualization accelerators have cost, performance, and size advantages over parallel processors.
All architectures implement ray casting using parallel and pipelined hardware.
We introduce a new metric that normalizes performance to compare these architectures. We also discuss future applications of special purpose accelerators. All Rights Reserved. The full text of is available to members of the IEEE Computer Society who have an online subscription and an e-account .