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Hi-Z Build Pass

Hierarchical depth pyramid construction — building a conservative max-depth mip chain from the scene depth buffer for GPU occlusion culling

Updated March 25, 2026•13 min read•
cullinghierarchical-zdepth
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Related Documentation

Occlusion Cull Pass

GPU Hi-Z occlusion culling — projecting per-instance AABBs into screen space and testing against the hierarchical depth pyramid to produce a per-instance visibility bitmask

Shadow Pass

Deep technical reference for Helio's two-pass GPU-driven shadow system — ShadowMatrixPass (compute) and ShadowPass (depth rasterisation), covering the shadow atlas, CSM frustum-fit algorithm, FNV-1a dirty detection, dynamic-offset trick, and downstream integration with the deferred lighting pass.

Depth Pre-Pass

A depth-only geometry pass that fills the depth buffer before the GBuffer pass, converting overdraw from O(geometry) to O(visible_pixels) fragment work via hardware early-Z rejection.