I used additive gaussian fields (restricted by bounding regions) for this back in the late 90's for audio visualizations in a ripper/player called "Siren" (back when we actually thought we could charge money for something like that).
The technique worked well on non-accelerated (CPU only) hardware of the era, with the additive approach saving the pain of needing to keep a z buffer or fragment list.
Gaussian voxel reconstruction is useful in medical and GIS settings, which, if memory serves, is where Kyle Freeman from Novalogic drew on for his work on Comanche. As far as I know, that was the first commercial game with voxel rendering... It's been a bit since I played it, but the swimming jaggies make me think that it was Manhattan distance height map offset by planar traversal (kinda like Doom raycasting) or some similar trick. I don't recall any intersections or overhangs, but, to be fair, I was a middle schooler when Comanche came out.
It also ran fine on my weak sauce PC.
Once acceleration hit, transformation of triangles with fixed-function pipelines took over. The ability to push textured triangles with minimal per-pixel value adjustment took over. Slowly but surely we've swing back to high ALU balance (albeit via massive stream parallelism). We've shifted from heavy list/vertex transformers to giant array multiply/add processors.
It's a pretty great time to be a processing nerd.
