Triangle order optimization for graphics hardware computation culling

(a) front-to-back (b) vertex cache optimized (c) our method Figure 1: Illustration of overdraw and vertex cache efficiency. In the front views, darker regions represent high-overdraw. In the side views, darker regions represent cache misses. In Nehab et al. [2006], we describe an automatic preprocessing al-gorithm that reorders triangles in a mesh so as to enable the graph-ics hardware to efficiently cull both vertex and pixel processing at rendering time. Our method brings the overdraw rates of a wide range of models close to that of front-to-back order, while preserv-ing state-of-the-art vertex cache performance. This results in higher frame rates for pixel-bound applications with no penalty to vertex-bound applications.