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culling
Throwing away geometry the viewer can't see before spending time drawing it.
Rendering is expensive, so a renderer discards primitives that won't contribute to the final image. The most common form is back-face culling: triangles facing away from the camera are skipped, since a solid object hides its own back. Other forms discard geometry outside the screen or blocked by nearer objects.
See also
- depth testThe per-pixel check that decides whether a new surface is in front of what's already been drawn.
- draw callA single command telling the GPU to render a batch of geometry.
- depth bufferA hidden per-pixel scratchpad that records how far away the nearest drawn surface is.