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PCU: the programmable culling unit

Published: 29 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Culling techniques have always been a central part of computer graphics, but graphics hardware still lack efficient and flexible support for culling. To improve the situation, we introduce the programmable culling unit, which is as flexible as the fragment program unit and capable of quickly culling entire blocks of fragments. Furthermore, it is very easy for the developer to use the PCU as culling programs can be automatically derived from fragment programs containing a discard instruction. Our PCU can be integrated into an existing fragment program unit with a modest hardware overhead of only about 10%. Using the PCU, we have observed shader speedups between 1.4 and 2.1 for relevant scenes.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGGRAPH '07: ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 papers
August 2007
1019 pages
ISBN:9781450378369
DOI:10.1145/1275808
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 29 July 2007

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Author Tags

  1. culling
  2. hardware
  3. rasterization
  4. shaders

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SIGGRAPH '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 108 of 455 submissions, 24%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,822 of 8,601 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Tile Pair-Based Adaptive Multi-Rate Stereo ShadingIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2018.288331426:6(2303-2314)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2020
  • (2010)Spatio-temporal upsampling on the GPUProceedings of the 2010 ACM SIGGRAPH symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games10.1145/1730804.1730819(91-98)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2010
  • (2008)The State of the Art in Mobile Graphics ResearchIEEE Computer Graphics and Applications10.1109/MCG.2008.8328:4(74-84)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2008
  • (undefined)Real-Time 3d Visualization of Forest Fire Spread Based on Tree Morphology and Finite State MachineSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.3982955

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