[vtkusers] Suggestions for volume+surface hardware ?

[Lisa Avila]

Hello John,

It depends on how you do your volume rendering - if you use a 
vtkVolumeTextureMapper2D it will use the graphics card, and here you can 
tweak it to make the "more memory" cards perform better. But you have the 
pixel depth artifacts to deal with - which get worse with better resolution 
data.

If you use the vtkVolumeRayCastMapper you get floating point precision, but 
you run as the speed of the processors. It does have a nice multi-res 
strategy and is my preferred choice on my new system. I can interactively 
render relatively large data sets (256^3 and bigger) without a problem - as 
long as I can live with some loss in image quality during interaction.

Lisa


At 03:33 PM 2/21/2002, John Shalf wrote:

>Lisa,
>are there any issues with the 8-bit-per-pixel graphics
>affecting the quality of the volume rendering for the larger
>volumes (ie. one draw of the SGI is the
>12-bits-per-color-component framebuffer)?  Also, does having
>a lot of texture memory on the graphics card help improve
>performance of rendering large volumes or is that not a big
>deal for the volume rendering? (to what degree is the volume
>rendering take advantage of the texture/gfx hardware... I
>hadn't looked recently, but it seemed that it used to be
>software volume rendering overlaid on hardware geometry in
>which case fast processors are essential and large texture
>memory + deep framebuffers offered by SGI were not of much
>consequence).
>
>-john
>
>Lisa Avila wrote:
> >
> > Hi Rob,
> >
> > I just bought a new system - it has two 1.7 GHz Pentium IV Xeon processors,
> > 768 MB of RAM, and a Elsa Gladiac 920 (GeForce 3) graphics card. It is VERY
> > nice for volume rendering and image processing (because of the two fast
> > processors) and is nice for geometric rendering (because of the GeForce 3).
> > The whole system was about $2500. If you really want to splurge, go for the
> > 2.2 GHz processors and a slightly newer graphics card - probably bumping
> > the system up to near $4000. If I am not mistaken, this is still quite a
> > bit less than most Unix (Sun, SGI, HP) workstations - definitely less than
> > any dual processor Unix workstation, and probably outperforms it by quite a
> > bit.
> >
> > Lisa
> >
> > At 04:04 AM 2/21/2002, Day, Robert wrote:
> > >We have just been funded to upgrade our aging SGI, and so I am now facing
> > >the question of what to buy.
> > >
> > >Given the huge advances in PC graphics cards, and the fact that a lot 
> of the
> > >software I want to run is now available on linux, I am wondering 
> whether the
> > >best price/performance is to be had in a fast PC.  Robert and 
> S?¢Öìastien's
> > >benchmark currently show a PC leading the pack by a significant 
> margin, but
> > >the simple sphere does not test volume rendering.  We want to do medical
> > >image processing and volume rendering as well as polygonal surfaces (but
> > >rarely NURBS).
> > >
> > >So, realising that it's a difficult question that could produce more heat
> > >than light, I ask the question: What's best to buy to get fast volume and
> > >surface rendering using vtk.
> > >
> > >Any advice ?
> > >
> > >Rob
> > >
> > >Robert Day            ph  +61 8 9225 3227
> > >Project Bioengineer   fax +61 8 9225 1138
> > >Royal Perth Hospital  robert.day at health.wa.gov.au
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