Abstract: The photon mapping is one of the more widely used algorithms for rendering scenes with participating media. Currently, it suffers from two main problems: one is how to improve the rendering efficiency, and another is how to reduce large memory requirement to store the photons. In this paper, we propose a hardware-accelerated algorithm that is based on radial basis function model for rendering participating media with multiple scattering. The radial basis function model is used to describe the photon distribution in participating media, and the main purpose is to provide high reconstruction quality using a relatively low number of basis function terms. Consequently, it can result in faster rendering. The radiance estimation is designed according to the radial basis function model. The implementation demonstrates that proposed method is the attractive low memory representation and it is capable of fully simulating the scattering of participating media with interactive feedback to the user.