Obscuration Culling on Parallel Graphics Architectures
Chris Georges · 1995
: Obscuration culling makes use of hierarchy information to accelerate rendering of geometric models. Given some sort of object hierarchy composed of bounding volumes it is possible to avoid transforming and rendering the contents of a volume if the volume itself lies outside the view frustum or is completely invisible when rendered against the current z-buffer. Using this idea in conjunction with the exploitation of temporal coherence to assure that the z-buffer is "almost complete" can yield large speedups for scenes with high depth complexity. This paper is intended both as an introduction to obscuration culling and as a discussion of issues related to its implementation on parallel machines in general and Pixel-Planes 5 in particular. No familiarity with Pixel-Planes is assumed, but the reader should have some understanding of z-buffering and the standard graphics pipeline. A review of this paper should enable the reader to identify situations in which obscuration culling will be ...