Guessing here but so they can be turned into a polygon model for easier display, yes you can directly volume render the data but say a 1024 x 1024 x 1024 cube e

Guessing here but so they can be turned into a polygon model for easier display, yes you can directly volume render the data but say a 1024 x 1024 x 1024 cube even at a byte per voxel would be a large amount of memory, most of which will be empty I'm guessing OpenCL is being used to accelerate Marching cubes or some other similar algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_cubes This post by Smash of Fairlight http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/ http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/numb-res/ talks about some of the reason why you want to do this but in a very different context