OpenGL Volumizer™ harnesses the power of 3D textures to provide a powerful combination of features and capabilities previously unavailable to the industry. OpenGL Volumizer provides unprecedented features such as the ability to roam through arbitrarily large data sets, and leverages available 3D texture-mapping support, boosting application performance upwards of 10 to 100 times faster than CPU-bound solutions.

OpenGL Volumizer also introduces the concept of a "volumetric primitive," the breakthrough concept that enables:

• mixing of volume objects and geometric objects within the same 3D scene
• specification of arbitrarily shaped regions of interest

Additionally, as volumetric data now coexists in the same scene as surface geometry, most any operation that can be performed on a 3D surface, such as shading and picking, can now be applied to 3D volumes as well.

OpenGL Volumizer represents a huge leap forward in volume rendering research and applicability. Now powerful volume rendering applications can be written in shorter time and with higher performance. Additionally, by breaking down the barriers between what was once two very dissimilar data types - surfaces and volumes, OpenGL Volumizer will greatly advance the practicality of volumes in the oil & gas, scientific, and medical markets, as well as in non-traditional volume rendering markets such as entertainment, CAD/CAM, and visual simulation.

OpenGL Volumizer™ 2.x should be distinguished from its predecessor, OpenGL Volumizer™ 1.2. OpenGL Volumizer 2.x is optimized to take advantage of SGI® high-end scalable servers and does not support 2D texture-based volume rendering. OpenGL Volumizer 2.x also provides a much higher-level API than OpenGL Volumizer 1.2, enabling the application writer to solve large data problems with greater ease. More information on the differences can be found in the OpenGL Volumizer 2.x Programming Guide. (PDF 2.1M)