Applications of pixel textures in visualization and realistic image synthesis

With fast 3D graphics becoming more and more available even on low end platforms, the focus in developing new graphics hardware is beginning to shift towards higher quality rendering and additional functionality instead of simply higher performance implementations of the traditional graphics pipeline. On this search for improved quality it is important to identify a powerful set of orthogonal features to be implemented in hardware, which can then be flexibly combined to form new algorithms. Pixel textures are an OpenGL extension by Silicon Graphics that fits into this category. In this paper, we demonstrate the benefits of this extension by presenting several different algorithms exploiting its functionality to achieve high quality, high performance solutions for a variety of different applications from scientific visualization and realistic image synthesis. We conclude that pixel textures are a valuable, powerful feature that should become a standard in future graphics systems.