1. A method of computing 3D volume rendering data in a cloud compute environment having a set of cloud hosts, comprising: receiving, from one or more requesting users, a dataset associated with a 3D volume rendering operation at a client, the dataset representing an image at a given number of frames per second, each frame of the image having a uniform distribution of pixels, at least two frames of an image sequence having varying resolution with respect to one another, and at least two pixels within a particular frame each being associated with a ray having a varying number of ray tracing steps with respect to one another, the ray sampling the dataset along a set of sampling points whose locations along the ray are determined as the ray is cast; performing a volume rendering computation on the dataset in the cloud compute environment using at least one cloud host having a graphics processing unit (GPU), the volume rendering computation calculating a continuous per-pixel dynamic sampling distance for ray tracing initiated from a virtual camera associated with the client, the continuous per-pixel dynamic sampling distance being a distance between two sample locations that varies dynamically and in a non-uniform manner as a function of how values of voxels are changing within the 3D volume; and returning a result of the volume rendering computation to the requesting user, the result adapted to facilitate a 3D volume rendering of an image from the virtual camera based on the dataset.