April 20, 2026
Culling the hype
Modern Rendering Culling Techniques
Dev crowd roars: stop drawing what you can’t see — that’s how games stay fast
TLDR: The piece argues that skipping anything the player can’t see is still the secret to fast games. Commenters cheered, cited classic DOOM/Quake-era tricks, and cracked reality-sim jokes, turning a tech explainer into a playful smackdown of AI hype and a love letter to practical optimization.
The article throws shade at the “AI will build your game in days” crowd, and the comments absolutely eat it up. Readers rally behind old-school optimization: if the player can’t see it, don’t render it. One fan sums it up with pure enthusiasm (“Dooope!”), while another thanks the author for the clean visuals. But the loudest mic drop comes from a veteran flex: “PVS isn’t that expensive” — a nod to old techniques like Potentially Visible Set and Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), the tricks that helped classic shooters like DOOM and Quake only draw what mattered.
For everyone not living in a graphics lab, here’s the vibe: culling means skipping work your eyes won’t notice. That includes distance culling (too far to care), backface culling (don’t draw the back of a 3D object), and frustum culling (anything outside the camera cone gets ghosted). A dev even vowed to add it to their own project, dropping a link to slitherworld.com, proving this wasn’t just theory — it’s “ship-your-game” energy.
And of course, the meme moment: one commenter wondered if their apartment is still “rendered” while they’re at work. Cue the existential panic: Is your couch outside the frustum? The community’s verdict: fancy engines and AI buzzwords are cute, but smart culling is the real glow-up.
Key Points
- •The article emphasizes that optimization remains essential in real-time rendering, with culling as a key practice despite modern tools like DLSS 5 and Unreal Engine 5.
- •Distance culling skips objects beyond a set range; to avoid pop-in, use dithered fades, aggressive LODs, or impostors, and complement with screen-size checks.
- •Backface culling, configured via the PSO, skips back-facing triangles, saving rasterization and fragment work but not vertex work in traditional pipelines.
- •In GPU-driven pipelines, culling can be moved earlier via compute or task/amplification stages to cull meshlets before rasterization.
- •Frustum culling tests bounding volumes (e.g., spheres, AABBs) against frustum planes and is typically an early, cheap, and highly effective pass.