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arXiv · 2504.04564

GPU Volume Rendering with Hierarchical Compression Using VDB

Stefan Zellmann·Milan Jaros·Jefferson Amstutz·Ingo Wald
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Abstract

We propose a compression-based approach to GPU rendering of large volumetric data using OpenVDB and NanoVDB. We use OpenVDB to create a lossy, fixed-rate compressed representation of the volume on the host, and use NanoVDB to perform fast, low-overhead, and on-the-fly decompression during rendering. We show that this approach is fast, works well even in a (incoherent) Monte Carlo path tracing context, can significantly reduce the memory requirements of volume rendering, and can be used as an almost drop-in replacement into existing 3D texture-based renderers.

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Stefan Zellmann, Milan Jaros, Jefferson Amstutz, Ingo Wald. 2025-04-06. GPU Volume Rendering with Hierarchical Compression Using VDB. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04564

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