History
Umbra Software was spun off from Hybrid Graphics in 2005. Umbra Software acquired Hybrid Graphics' dPVS and continued its development. The next generation of this technology, named Umbra, was a hardware accelerated occlusion culling middleware. Umbra was released in September 2007. In 2009, Umbra Occlusion Booster was released and it was optimized for multi-core systems such as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PCs.
In 2011 Umbra mostly concentrated on developing Umbra 3. The solution offers performance optimization by optimizing critical parts of a game such as rendering and by providing tools to help with content streaming and game logic. Umbra 3 builds an internal representation of a game scene and uses this data at runtime to perform efficient queries that can be used to e.g. determine the set of visible objects for the player or determine the set of objects that are within a given distance from a point. The difference to past versions is that Umbra 3 has a pre-process where it compiles the visibility data which is then used at runtime to perform visibility-related queries. A new feature in 2012 is the streaming functionality allowing building of visibility data at runtime.
In March 2010, Unity Technologies announced that the next release of Unity would feature built-in occlusion culling preprocessing powered by Umbra. Unity Pro ships with Umbra's occlusion culling solution.
Edge Magazine's website next-generation.biz reported on December 15th, 2011 that Umbra's technology is an integral part of Bungie's new 3D engine and game.
ArenaNet's Guild Wars 2 was released on August 28th and the game uses Umbra 3.
On August 14, 2012, Umbra announced its partnership with Nintendo which allows the licensing of the Umbra 3 middleware for Wii U developers.
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