You've been logged out of GDC Vault since the maximum users allowed for this account has been reached. To access Members Only content on GDC Vault, please log out of GDC Vault from the computer which last accessed this account.

Click here to find out about GDC Vault Membership options for more users.

close

The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Why Render Hidden Objects? Cull Them With a Software Depth-Buffer Rasterizer! (Presented by Intel Corporation)
Speaker(s): Charumathi Chandrasekaran
Company Name(s): Intel Corporation
Track / Format: Programming

Did you know free users get access to 30% of content from the last 2 years?


Get your team full access to the most up to date GDC content

Overview: Most realistic 3D scenes contain objects that are occluded by other objects in the scene. Usually, these occluded objects are submitted to the GPU for rendering, only to have their pixels rejected by the z-buffer later in the pipeline. We will show you how to improve performance by lowering the computational cost of occluded objects. Our technique divides scene objects into two groups: occluders and occludes, and uses a software rasterizer to draw the occluders to a depth buffer. Then we test each occludee for occlusion by rasterizing its bounding box against this depth buffer. Performance improves further by reducing the number of processed occluders and occludees with frustum culling. We also optimized it with SSE and multi-threading. On a 2.3GHz 3rd Gen Intel Core Processor (Ivy Bridge) system with Intel HD 3000 graphics, software occlusion culling achieves up to 8X performance speedup compared to a non-culled display of the sample scene.

GDC 2013

Charumathi Chandrasekaran

Intel Corporation

free content

Programming

Programming