Visibility in a Real-World Cross-Platform Game Engine

With hardware capabilities and customer expectations rising every new game console generation, efficient visibility algorithms become a more and more crucial part of every modern rendering engine. Although GPUs built into the consoles become better each generation, game developers are always striving to get more performance and better quality out of a game console. Therefore it is a must to employ powerful visibility algorithms which allow the developers to render more complex scenes while maintaining smooth framerates. This book explores whether current state-of-the-art visibility algorithms can be used on game consoles, and describes the layers of abstraction needed in developing a multi-platform rendering engine. This book focuses on the design and implementation of a rendering engine for major current-gen platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft XBox360, Sony's PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii, dealing with the vastly different platform architectures. It shows how visibility algorithms are developed and integrated into the rendering engine, and enhanced and tailored to specific hardware needs and capabilities.