About culling

Xception · Post by **Xception** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 4:45 pm

Does Irrlicht use visibility culling without using an octtree scenenode?
Does it make sense to use an octtree scenenode with todays graphics cards that have hardware culling?

niko · Post by **niko** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 4:53 pm

Yes, it hst visibility culling for every scene node. You can switch it on and of using setAutomaticCulling(true/false);. Hardware culling is, besides the standard backfaceculling, not used currently.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Mar 11, 2004 8:43 pm

what is hst visibility culling? and how does hardware culling (besides standard backface culling) work? which cards do support it?

it would be nice if someone could explain this!

Luke923 · Post by **Luke923** » Sun Mar 14, 2004 11:11 pm

If I remember right, hardware culling basically runs vertices through a z-buffer check to see which is visible. But, don't take my word for it, since I stopped researching into it since I found out that it tends be real slow, bogging down the app. If you are still interested, you might want to search on MSDN or in Google Groups on the QueryInterface() function. As for which cards that support it, just about any card built for DX8 or 9 should support it, but any card listing "Occlusion Culling" as a feature should support it.

Again, I wouldn't worry about this though, as more optimized occlusion culling techniques are available in software.

If you want more info, do a Google search on "hardware occlusion culling."