An effective visibility culling method based on cache block

As the complexity of 3D scenes is on the increase, the search for an effective visibility culling method has become one of the most important issues to be addressed in the design of 3D rendering processors. Here, we propose a new rasterization pipeline with visibility culling; the proposed architecture performs the visibility culling at an early stage of the rasterization pipeline (especially at the traversal stage) by retrieving data in a pixel cache without any significant hardware logics such as the hierarchical z-buffer. If the data to be retrieved does not exist in the pixel cache, the proposed architecture performs a prefetch operation in order to reduce the miss penalty of the pixel cache. That is, the cache miss penalty can be reduced as the transfer of a missed cache block from the frame memory into the pixel cache can be handled simultaneously with the rasterization pipeline executions. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture can achieve a performance gain of about 32% compared with the conventional pretexturing architecture and about 7% compared to the hierarchical z-buffer visibility scheme.