Implementing view frustum culling
When working with a lot of polygonal data, there is a need to reduce the amount of geometry pushed to the GPU for processing. There are several techniques for scene management, such as quadtrees, octrees, and bsp trees. These techniques help in sorting the geometry in visibility order, so that the objects are sorted (and some of these even culled from the display). This helps in reducing the work load on the GPU.
Even before such techniques can be used, there is an additional step which most graphics applications do and that is view frustum culling. This process removes the geometry if it is not in the current camera's view frustum. The idea is that if the object is not viewable, it should not be processed. A frustum is a chopped pyramid with its tip at the camera position and the base is at the far clip plane. The near clip plane is where the pyramid is chopped, as shown in the following figure. Any geometry inside the viewing frustum is displayed...
