The technique used in this sample divides scene objects into occluders and occludees and culls occludees based on a depth comparison with the occluders that are software rasterized to the depth buffer. The sample code uses frustum culling and is optimized with Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) and Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instruction sets and multi-threading to achieve up to 8X performance speedup compared to a non-culled display of the sample scene.

For a detailed explanation, please see this article.

In addition to the technique detailed above, a separate Masked Occlusion Culling library has been included for comparison purposes, with its main up-to-date codebase being developed at https://github.com/GameTechDev/MaskedOcclusionCulling

As of late 2017 the Software Occlusion Culling Sample code is in the maintenance mode; reported bugs will be fixed but no upgrades are planned so far. However, Masked Occlusion Culling technique is still being actively developed.

The sample will not execute properly when run from within Visual Studio unless the 'Working Directory' is set to $(TargetDir).

• Windows 8 or later
• Visual Studio 2015 or higher