Abstract
In this report, we describe the development of a high-speed volume rendering system that combines 3D texture compression and parallel programming techniques for rendering multiple high-resolution 3D images obtained in medical or industrial CT. The use of 3D texture compression reduces memory consumption to 1/4 the original level with no negative impact on the display speed, and parallel processing using multiple cores in the CPU makes it possible to reduce the computational time with 3D texture compression to the same as that without 3D texture compression. By employing this approach, a personal computer with standard graphics capabilities can be used to display multiple high-resolution 3D images. In this evaluation, no large differences were observed between rendering images with and without 3D texture compression.
