关键词: 顶点编程, 片段编程, 三维纹理体绘制, 空间跳跃

Abstract: This paper discusses a vertex program which efficiently computes the slicing for textured-based volume rendering.This novel technique enables us to balance the workload between vertex processor，fragment processor and memory bus.Use the gradient on the fly technique to reduce the huge memory consumption.As an application we suggest a novel approach for empty space skipping for volume rendering，the empty region in the volumetric data can be eliminated by the space leaping techniques.Then the input/output burden of the texture memory maybe reduces effectively and the texture assisted volume rendering is accelerated.For large scale volumetric data，the algorithm can improve rendering performance.

Key words: vertex programming, fragment programming, 3D texture hardware volume rendering, space leaping