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S. Reinalter:
"Visibility in a real-world cross-platform game engine";
Supervisor: M. Wimmer; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, 2010.

With hardware capabilities and customer expectations rising every new game console generation, e cient visibility algorithms become a more and more crucial part of every modern rendering engine. Although GPUs built into the consoles become better each generation, game developers are always striving to get more performance and better quality out of a game console. Therefore it is a must to employ powerful visibility algorithms which allow the developers to render more complex scenes while maintaining smooth framerates. This thesis explores whether current state-of-the-art visibility algorithms can be used on game consoles, and describes the layers of abstraction needed in developing a multi-platform rendering engine. Therefore, the rst part of the thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a rendering engine for major current-gen platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, the Microsoft XBox360, Sony's PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii, dealing with the vastly di erent platform architectures. Furthermore, solutions to engine design problems related to both hardware capabilities as well as software engineering practices are explored. Concluding the rst part, prerequisites and building blocks for implementing visibility algorithms are developed. The second part of the thesis concentrates on developing and integrating visibility algorithms into the aforementioned engine, building upon the components introduced in the rst part. The used visibility algorithms are enhanced and tailored to speci c hardware needs and capabilities, getting the most performance out of game consoles. Finally, results and possible improvements and future enhancements for current state-of-the-art algorithms conclude this thesis.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_188999.pdf