Patent ID: 7965291

Claim:
A system for polygonizing isosurfaces, comprising: a graphics processing unit, including: a vertex shader to shade vertices; a geometry shader receiving vertices from said vertex shader, said geometry shader utilizing a command supporting the simultaneous processing of groups of four vertices at a time with each group of four vertices selected to represent a respective tetrahedron; a raster stage to rasterize primitives received from said geometry shader; and a pixel shader to shade pixel fragments received from said raster stage; a central processing unit; and a memory coupled to said central processing unit, said memory storing a three-dimensional application and supporting isosurface visualization software in which sample locations of tetrahedral grids are represented as groups of four vertices for processing in said graphics processing unit with said vertex shader determining at least one scalar field attribute for each vertex associated with a tetrahedron and said geometry shader generating at least one polygon for an isosurface determined by said geometry shader to intersect a tetrahedral grid, wherein said graphics processing unit is compliant with an OpenGL® processing architecture in which an OpenGL extension is used to implement the function of said geometry shader, wherein said geometry shader performs tessellation in a post-projection space, wherein said OpenGL extension is used to process groups of four vertices by said geometry shader, wherein said OpenGL extension includes a command corresponding to at least one of NV_geometry_program4 and EXT_geometry_shader4.