3D texture

3D texture with opacity rendered in Unity

A 3D texture is a type of memory buffer that can be used in graphics rendering. It is effectively a volumetric data format.

OpenGL supports 3D textures in all major versions starting about version 2.0.

DICOM data can be stored as a 3D texture.

3D textures can be raymarched against.

Many versions of Unity support 3D textures.

3D textures require extremely large amounts of VRAM to store uncompressed. One way to bypass this VRAM requirement is to use a world model, or use chunking from main memory or permanent storage.

The simplest type is a binary voxel grid.