Catherine Choo , Moon Hee Choi , Shin Dug Kim

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 1-8, Feb. 2008
10.3745/KIPSTA.2008.15.1.1,   PDF Download:

Abstract

An occlusion culling method, one of visibility culling methods, excludes invisible objects or triangles which are covered by other objects. As it reduces computation quantity, occlusion culling is an effective method to handle complex scenes in real-time. But an existing common occlusion culling method, such as hardware occlusion query method, sends objects’ data twice to GPU and this causes processing overheads once for occlusion culling test and the other is for rendering. And another existing hardware occlusion culling method, VCBP, can test objects’ visibility quickly, but it neither test bounding volume nor return test result to application stage. In this paper, we propose a single pass occlusion culling method which uses temporal and spatial coherency, with effective occlusion culling hardware architecture. In our approach, the hardware performs occlusion culling test rapidly with cache on the rasterization stage where triangles are transformed into fragments. At the same time, hardware sends each primitive’s visibility information to application stage. As a result, the application stage reduces data transmission quantity by excluding covered objects using the visibility information on previous frame and hierarchical spatial tree. Our proposed method improved maximum 44%, minimum 14% compared with S&W method based on hardware occlusion query. And the performance is increased 25% and 17% respectively, compared to maximum and minimum performance of CHC method which is based on occlusion culling method.

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