Skip to main content

Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES

PCU: The programmable culling unit

Hasselgren, Jon LU and Akenine-Möller, Tomas LU (2007) In ACM Transactions on Graphics 26(3).
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.
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
and
organization
publishing date
type
Contribution to journal
publication status
published
subject
keywords
culling, shaders, rasterization, hardware
in
ACM Transactions on Graphics
volume
26
issue
3
publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
external identifiers
  • wos:000248914000095
  • scopus:34547689078
ISSN
0730-0301
DOI
10.1145/1276377.1276492
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
23bd153b-f37d-492c-9e7d-7fce3a6f4136 (old id 689742)
date added to LUP
2016-04-01 16:50:13
date last changed
2022-03-07 08:41:54
@article{23bd153b-f37d-492c-9e7d-7fce3a6f4136,
  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.}},
  author       = {{Hasselgren, Jon and Akenine-Möller, Tomas}},
  issn         = {{0730-0301}},
  keywords     = {{culling; shaders; rasterization; hardware}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  number       = {{3}},
  publisher    = {{Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)}},
  series       = {{ACM Transactions on Graphics}},
  title        = {{PCU: The programmable culling unit}},
  url          = {{http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1276377.1276492}},
  doi          = {{10.1145/1276377.1276492}},
  volume       = {{26}},
  year         = {{2007}},
}