Importance of Clipping in Video Games
Good clipping strategy is important in the development of video games in order to maximize the game's frame rate and visual quality. Despite GPU chips that are faster every year, it remains computationally expensive to transform, texture, and shade polygons, especially with the multiple texture and shading passes common today. Hence, game developers must live within a certain "budget" of polygons that can be drawn each video frame.
To maximize the game's visual quality, developers prefer to establish the highest possible polygon budget; therefore, every optimization of the graphics pipeline benefits the polygon budget and therefore the game.
In video games, then, clipping is a critically important optimization that speeds up the rendering of the current scene, and therefore allows the developer to increase the renderer's polygon budget. Programmers often devise clever heuristics to speed up the clipper, as it would be computationally prohibitive to use line casting or ray tracing to determine with 100% accuracy which polygons are and are not within the camera's field of view. One of the most popular methods for optimization is the use of octrees to partition scenes into rendered and non-rendered areas.
The clipping problems introduced by reflective surfaces are generally avoided in games as of 2005 by simulating reflections without actually doing all the calculations that would be necessary for accurate reflections.
Due to the use of the term 'no clipping' to refer to turning off collision detection, the two are often confused.
Read more about this topic: Clipping (computer Graphics)
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