Culling at Scale: Eliminating Edge Pop and Shadow Desync

Crowd rendering telemetry: how light-fit hoisting cut frame recording by 12.5x and SMBB eliminated cull-pop.

Core Finding:In dense crowd rendering, standard frustum culling frequently introduces edge pop and shadow desynchronization. In Atlas Engine crowd benchmarks across 1,024 animated instances, hoisting light-fit calculations reduced whole-frame time by 64% (31.07 ms to 11.20 ms) and shadow recording by 12.5x, while phase-independent union bounding volumes eliminated cull-pop artifacts entirely.

Whole-Frame Latency

31.07 -> 11.20 ms

Whole-frame execution dropped by 64% after hoisting crowd light-fit calculations.

Shadow Recording (B7)

9.60 -> 0.77 ms

Shadow pass command recording accelerated 12.5x by eliminating redundant light-matrix rebuilds.

Frustum Cull-Pop

0 Artifacts

Phase-independent SMBB union volumes eliminated frustum edge culling pop.

Renderables Scanned

3,409 / frame

B6 visibility prep successfully culled non-visible instances across deep crowd arrays.

Empirical Findings Table

Crowd rendering telemetry at 1,024 animated instances

Telemetry Metric	Measured Value	Context & Observability
Whole-Frame Latency	31.07 -> 11.20 ms	Whole-frame execution dropped by 64% after hoisting crowd light-fit calculations.
Shadow Recording (B7)	9.60 -> 0.77 ms	Shadow pass command recording accelerated 12.5x by eliminating redundant light-matrix rebuilds.
Frustum Cull-Pop	0 Artifacts	Phase-independent SMBB union volumes eliminated frustum edge culling pop.
Renderables Scanned	3,409 / frame	B6 visibility prep successfully culled non-visible instances across deep crowd arrays.

Engineering Action Directives

Hoisting light-fit view projection calculations out of crowd instancing loops provides substantial CPU and GPU command-recording savings.
Phase-independent union bounding volumes prevent frustum edge popping without the overhead of dynamic per-phase bounding updates.

Methodology Boundaries & Limits

Engine specific: Implemented and profiled within the Atlas Engine Vulkan renderer; other rendering pipelines with different batching strategies may see different ratios.
Evaluated up to 1,024 instances: Larger crowds (10,000+ instances) will require GPU-driven indirect culling rather than CPU bounds testing.