Summary
In this chapter, we have introduced the concept of meshlets, a construct that helps us break down large meshes into more manageable chunks and that can be used to perform occlusion computations on the GPU. We have demonstrated how to use the library of our choice (MeshOptimizer) to generate meshlets, and we also illustrated the extra data structures (cones and bounding spheres) that are useful for occlusion operations.
We introduced mesh and task shaders. Conceptually similar to compute shaders, they allow us to quickly process meshlets on the GPU. We demonstrated how to use task shaders to perform back-face and frustum culling, and how mesh shaders replace vertex shaders by processing and generating multiple primitives in parallel.
Finally, we went through the implementation of occlusion culling. We first listed the steps that compose this technique. Next, we demonstrated how to compute a depth pyramid from our existing depth buffer. Lastly, we analyzed the occlusion...
