An order of magnitude faster isosurface rendering in software on a PC than using dedicated, general purpose rendering hardware

The purpose of this work is to compare the speed of isosurface rendering in software with that using dedicated hardware. Input data consist of 10 different objects from various parts of the body and various modalities (CT, MR, and MRA) with a variety of surface sizes (up to 1 million voxels/2 million triangles) and shapes. The software rendering technique consists of a particular method of voxel-based surface rendering, called shell rendering. The hardware method is OpenGL-based and uses the surfaces constructed from our implementation of the Marching Cubes algorithm. The hardware environment consists of a variety of platforms, including a Sun Ultra I with a Creator3D graphics card and a Silicon Graphics Reality Engine II, both with polygon rendering hardware, and a 300 MHz Pentium PC. The results indicate that the software method (shell rendering) was 18 to 31 times faster than any hardware rendering methods. This work demonstrates that a software implementation of a particular rendering algorithm (shell rendering) can outperform dedicated hardware. We conclude that, for medical surface visualization, expensive dedicated hardware engines are not required. More importantly, available software algorithms (shell rendering) on a 300 MHz Pentium PC outperform the speed of rendering via hardware engines by a factor of 18 to 31.