GigaVoxels is a voxel-based rendering pipeline that makes the display of very large volumetric datasets very efficient. It is adapted to memory bound environments and it is designed for the data-parallel architecture of the GPU. It is capable of rendering objects at a detail level that matches the screen resolution and interactively adapts to the current point of view. Invisible parts are never even considered for contribution to the final image.

As a result, the algorithm obtains interactive to real-time framerates and demonstrates the use of extreme amounts of voxels in rendering, which is applicable in many different contexts. This is also confirmed by many game developers who seriously consider voxels as a potential standard primitive in video games. We will also show in this chapter that voxels are already powerful primitives that, for some rendering tasks, achieve higher performance than triangle-based representations.