Volumetric rendering

Volumetric rendering is a method of rendering 3D graphics where each ray or pixel of the output gadget such as a screen is cast against a 3D data structure where each point represents a bit of matter.

Volumetric rendering can be done in a fragment shader.

Volumetric rendering can be done using a 3D array of data, which are voxels. This can be done using a 3D texture in DirectX11, Vulkan, or OpenGL.

It is similar to light field rendering, but uses less data overall.

Data size

Storing a volume in memory can take a lot of memory.

A volume of 256 x 256 x 256 resolution at 32 bits per voxel takes about 500 megabits, or about 64 megabytes.

1024x1024x1024@32 takes about 34 gigabits, or about 4 gigabytes.