This paper discusses the trade-off between calculations and memory accesses in a 3D graphics tile renderer for visualization of data from medical scanners. The performance requirement of this application is a frame rate of 25 frames per second when rendering 3D models with 2 million triangles, i.e. 50 million triangles per second, sustained (not peak). At present, a software implementation is capable of 3-4 frames per second for a 1 million triangle model
