Darin McKinnis has updated the Viz Worth Watching blog with some under-the-hood details on the upcoming EnSight 9.1 Volume Rendering feature, and what you’ll need to make it work.  No surprises, you’ll need alot of memory and a new video card:

Regardless, you are going to need a graphics card produced in the last 2 years. Volume rendering requires a DirectX 10 compatible nVidia or ATI graphics card, not that EnSight uses DirectX but this is an indicator for the correct generation of graphics cards.

Volume rendering will use significantly more memory on the client, both for storing the volume cell data as well as rendering objects to be passed to the graphics card. These rendering objects also consume memory on the graphics card. An estimate for graphics memory required for running EnSight 9.1 includes:

  • 40MB EnSight with opaque surfaces
  • 64MB EnSight with semi-transparent surfaces (depth peeling)
  • 110MB EnSight with volume rendering

Due to OpenGL limitations on Mac OS X, these numbers are 67MB, 91MB, and 137MB when running the EnSight client on a Mac.

This includes the screen itself, our rendering buffers, depth peeling buffers, and volume peeling buffers. This is assuming a graphics window size of 1024×720 and the default of 6 peels. Memory requirements will increase for larger displays or more peels. This is just an entry level point before any geometry is rendered.

Interesting to hear that it’s working via Depth Peeling, presumably for Solid-Geometry/Volume interaction (like shown in the image above).  I also find the statement of a “DirectX10” compatible card a bit unsettling, and many people run EnSight on *Nix platforms.  Something more defined like the number of shaders or particular GL extensions would have been more useful.

I personally *love* volume rendering, but it takes quite a long time to process typically. Can’t wait to get my hands on it in EnSight and see if they’ve implemented any GPU acceleration strategies that put it beyond ParaView and VisIt.

via Viz Worth Watching: EnSight 9.1 Volume Rendering – how to prepare.

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