Boer, M. deGropl, A.Hesser, J.Männer, R.Bengt-Olaf Schneider and Andreas Schilling2014-02-062014-02-061996--https://doi.org/10.2312/EGGH/EGGH96/109-119The computational power required for direct volume rendering like ray-casting or volume ray-tracing can be provided by high­ speed rendering architectures. However the increasing proces­ sor speed makes a performance bottleneck obvious - the vol­ ume memory. This paper describes a volume memory architec­ ture that achieves at least a tenfold speed-up in read-out rate with moderate additional hardware. It has been simulated suc­ cessfully. A multi-level cache system is used with software prefetching and latency hiding. Pre- and postcaches addi­ tionally speed up the read-out rate so that a 5123 data set stored in a single memory module can be rendered at 3.125 Hz.