survey: accelerated 3D volumetric rendering

["Rick Towler" <rtowler(at)u.washington.edu>]

What are peoples experiences with accelerated 3d volumetric rendering.  I am
sure very high end  unix viz workstations have the ability to accelerate
volumetric rendering but what about lower end hardware.  Is this the domain
of high end video adapters only?

In my case we have a Sun Ultra60 with the Creator3d framebuffer and PC's
running consumer versions of nvidia's Geforce line.  The Creator3d is
painfully slow rendering anything.  The Geforce cards are quite fast with
your standard polygon rendering but volumetric rendering isn't supported in
hardware.

Does anyone have any experience with this using nvidia's Quadro line or with
3dLabs cards?  What about other platforms?

fwiw, Sun just released the Expert3d lite which does support accelerated
volumetric rendering and when bundled runs for $2000.  I guess that is low
end....

-Rick Towler