I was just wondering what kind of culling OpenGL can do for me to help with performance related issues?
I’m aware I can do culling myself on the object level; however I have only two objects and they are both complex enough to put a severe performance penalty – so when the objects are in view, performance is terrible.
I already have GL_CULL_FACE enabled, but is there anything else I can make OpenGL do? Is there some easily implementable manner of making OpenGL cull/prune away polygons that are not visible, e.g. polygons that are behind other polygons which are not needed to be drawn at the given time?
is there anything else I can make OpenGL do? Is there some easily implementable manner of making OpenGL cull/prune away polygons that are not visible, e.g. polygons that are behind other polygons which are not needed to be drawn at the given time?
You may want to look into occlusion queries (ARB_occlusion_query). They’re not trivial to implement correctly – there’s no glDrawStuffFaster() – but when used correctly, they do exactly what you’re looking for.
And on those last two note, to make maximum use of the GPU’s ability to “pre-reject” triangles and fragments early (aka ZCULL and EarlyZ):
[ol][li] Clear the depth+stencil buffer[] Don’t change the depth value in your fragment shader[] Don’t change the direction of the depth test while writing depth[] Don’t enable stencil writes when doing stencil testing[] Don’t render to a 2D texture array (??)[] Write depth buffer with same test direction as is used for testing[] Don’t render a lot of little features[] Don’t allocate too many depth buffers[] Don’t use 32F depth buffers[] Don’t reference gl_FragCoord.z in your fragment shader[] Don’t enable depth or stencil writes or enable occlusion queries AND [list=1][] - Use alpha test, or[] - Call discard, or[] - Use alpha-to-coverage, or[] - Use a SAMPLE_MASK != 0xFFFFFFFF[/ol][*] If you can, try to render polygons in generally a roughly front-to-back order.[/LIST][/li](Blatently ripped from the NVidia GPU programming guide.)
Also, if your fragment shading is “expensive”, then consider doing a “depth pre-pass” to set the depth buffer only, then rerender for shading with a DepthFunc of EQUAL. That way you don’t pay to shade any fragments that you can’t see. This first pass can also be “double-speed” if you follow the rules, so it’s not as expensive as you might think.
