Frustum Culling

What is Frustum Culling?

Frustum Culling means a performance optimization technique that prevents rendering objects outside the camera's viewable area (frustum), significantly improving application performance by reducing unnecessary processing of invisible elements.

How does Frustum Culling work?

This computational efficiency method operates by defining the camera's visible volume - shaped like a truncated pyramid or "frustum" - using six mathematical planes: the near clip plane, far clip plane, and four planes corresponding to the field-of-view boundaries. During each frame, the rendering pipeline tests scene objects against this frustum volume, completely skipping the rendering process for any objects that fall entirely outside these boundaries.

Modern development platforms implement frustum culling automatically as a fundamental optimization strategy, operating independently from complementary techniques like occlusion culling which handles objects hidden behind other visible elements.

How is Frustum Culling used?

For architectural visualization applications with complex building models containing thousands of components, frustum culling dramatically reduces rendering workloads by processing only objects within the current viewing direction.

Similarly, industrial training simulations with detailed machinery models benefit from improved performance when numerous components outside the current viewpoint are efficiently excluded from processing.

By focusing computational resources exclusively on potentially visible elements, frustum culling enables applications to maintain higher frame rates and visual quality while supporting larger, more detailed environments than would otherwise be possible with available hardware.