A Comparison between GPU-based Volume Ray Casting Implementations: Fragment Shader, Compute Shader, OpenCL, and CUDA

Authors

  • Francisco Sans
  • Rhadamés Carmona

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.19153/cleiej.20.2.7

Keywords:

GPU, OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, Performance Comparison, Volume Ray Casting, Parallel APIs, Compute Shader

Abstract

Volume rendering is an important area of study in computer graphics, due to its application in areas such as medicine, physic simulations, oil and gas industries, and others. The main used method nowadays for volume rendering is ray casting. Nevertheless, there are a variety of parallel APIs that can be used to implement it. Thus, it is important to evaluate the performance of ray casting in diferent parallel APIs to help programmers in selecting one of them. In this paper, we present a performance comparison using OpenGL® with fragment shader, OpenGL® with compute shader, OpenCL, and CUDA.

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Published

2017-08-01

Issue

Vol. 20 No. 2 (2017): Special issue devoted to CLEI 2016 (part 1)

Section

Articles

License

CLEIej is supported by its home institution, CLEI, and by the contribution of the Latin American and international researchers community, and it does not apply any author charges whatsoever for submitting and publishing. Since its creation in 1998, all contents are made publicly accesibly. The current license being applied is a (CC)-BY license (effective October 2015; between 2011 and 2015 a (CC)-BY-NC license was used).