rendering and conservative occlusion culling for interactive display
of complex environments. A vertex hierarchy of the entire scene
is decomposed into a cluster hierarchy through a novel clustering
and partitioning algorithm. The cluster hierarchy is then used for
view-frustum and occlusion culling. Using hardware accelerated
occlusion queries and frame-to-frame coherence, a potentially
visible set of clusters is computed. An active vertex front and
face list is computed from the visible clusters and rendered using
vertex arrays. The integrated algorithm has been implemented
on a Pentium IV PC with a NVIDIA GeForce 4 graphics card
and applied in two complex environments composed of millions
of triangles. The resulting system can render these environments
at interactive rates with little loss in image quality and minimal
popping artifacts.