[vtkusers] efficiency

[Jim Morash]

Hello,

I'm using VTK to do volume rendering of a CT dataset. The priority in
this case is to render the dataset (with variable opacity, currently
256^3 but ideally 512^3) as fast as possible (ideally 10+ fps). I'm
currently using vtkVolumeTextureMapper2D, which works decently well but
is just not fast enough (one frame takes about 0.78s). Does anyone have
any comments about how much computational overhead vtk incurs by having
such a nice neat OO structure and all kinds of extras available (such as
timing the rendering process, etc.)?  Would it be worth the (large
amount of) effort to try and implement my own volume renderer, or is vtk
really pretty lean already?
Any advice would be very much appreciated... since we're trying to
produce something that would be cheap for institutions to acquire,
specialized hardware like a VolumePro is on the "we'd rather not" end of
the spectrum.
--Jim Morash

jmorash at mit.edu                     http://web.mit.edu/jmorash/www
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