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Software Design & Development Glossary

These days there’s an acronym for everything. Explore our software design & development glossary to find a definition for those pesky industry terms.

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Glossary
Back Face Culling
Back face culling is a technique used in computer graphics to improve rendering performance by eliminating the need to render polygons that are not visible to the viewer.

In a 3D environment, every polygon has two sides - a front face and a back face.

The front face is the side that is visible to the viewer, while the back face is hidden from view.

Back face culling works by determining which polygons are facing away from the viewer and therefore do not need to be rendered.

This process is crucial for optimizing rendering performance in complex scenes with many polygons.

By culling out the back faces of objects, the graphics card can focus on rendering only the polygons that are actually visible, reducing the computational load and improving overall frame rates. Back face culling is particularly useful in situations where objects are opaque and do not have transparent or translucent surfaces.

In these cases, there is no need to render the back faces of objects, as they will not contribute to the final image seen by the viewer. Overall, back face culling is an essential technique for improving rendering efficiency in 3D graphics applications.

By selectively rendering only the visible faces of objects, it helps to optimize performance and deliver a smoother and more responsive user experience.

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