We explore the evolution of culling and visibility determination in video games, building on work started over 30 years ago, and evolving with every generation of hardware.

Gamedev Courses: https://simondev.teachable.com/
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/simondevyt

Follow me on:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beer_and_code/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/iced_coffee_dev

In this video, I implement some of the various visibility techniques used by AAA games like Just Cause 2, Battlefield, and Splinter Cell, and others. We walk through the history of GDC presentations, and see how the techniques have evolved to what's considered state of the art today.

References talks:
https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SIGGRAPH_Advances_2021_final.pdf
https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/aaltonenhaar_siggraph2015_combined_final_footer_220dpi.pdf
https://gamma.cs.unc.edu/papers/documents/technicalreports/tr97004.pdf
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems2/part-i-geometric-complexity/chapter-6-hardware-occlusion-queries-made-useful
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr01/cs598b/papers/greene93.pdf
https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance/
https://www.humus.name/Articles/Persson_CreatingVastGameWorlds.pdf
https://www.ea.com/frostbite/news/culling-the-battlefield-data-oriented-design-in-practice
https://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/practical-occlusion-culling-in-killzone-3
https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/practical-visibility/
https://www.selfshadow.com/talks/rwc_gdc2010_v1.pdf
https://aras-p.info/texts/D3D9GPUHacks.html

How Games Have Worked for 30 Years to Do Less Work