为克服图形硬件对传统纹理映射体绘制的限制，提出了一种在普通PC上进行大规模数据场体绘制的有效方法。该方法中，体数据被划分为合适大小的数据块，这些数据块被动态的载入图形硬件，并利用3维纹理映射进行绘制。在整个绘制过程中，仅有一个数据块存储在图形硬件上，有效地提高了对大规模体数据的绘制能力。同时，充分利用目前PC图形硬件成熟的可编程特性，通过对梯度的实时计算来减少在传统纹理映射体绘制中巨大的内存消耗。实验结果表明，该方法在普通PC上可以对超过纹理内存容量的大规模体数据进行交互式体绘制。

A novel technique is presented for rendering large-scale volume datasets interactively on general purpose PC hardware. To circumvent the limited texture memory for texture based volume rendering, the dataset is partitioned into the bricks with reasonable size. The bricks are loaded to the graphics hardware dynamically and rendered using 3D texture mapping. During the rendering only one brick resides on the texture memory. Additionally, the sophisticated PC graphics hardware functionality is utilized to estimate the gradient on the fly avoiding the huge memory consumption in previous approaches. Using a prototype implementation of the algorithm, we are able to perform fast data loading and interactive visualization for the large datasets on a single standard PC.