Occlusion Culling Using Prioritized Visibility Queries

Part of the latest research efforts in occlusion culling focus on using hardware visibility query. In this paper, we present a novel method to prioritize the visibility query to work effectively together with an occlusion culling approach. We demonstrate that an addition of query priority to a simple front-to-back slab visibility processing can greatly reduce the number of unfruitful visibility query in occlusion culling computations. We also demonstrate how to make use of frame coherence in both cases of visibility query pass/fail to enhance the effectiveness of visibility culling technique. Combining with a typical occlusion culling method, we have applied our approach to several scenes with different structure complexes and the results have shown the effectiveness of the approach in minimizing the amount of non-essential visibility queries, hence improve overall performance of rendering system.