ABSTRACT
Of all the techniques which make modern video game graphics possible, level-of-detail (LOD) management may very well be the most important, the most groundbreaking, and the most game-changing. While LOD seems like a rather boring thing to think of as “groundbreaking,” in order to get the graphical quality we want in the world sizes we want, it’s crucial to not render everything as though the player was two centimeters away from it. With conservatively chosen LOD transition distances, immense speedups are possible without compromising the realism of the scene in any way. Viewed broadly, even things like visibility culling can be considered part of LOD-after all, the lowest detail possible for an object is to not render it at all. Graphics programmers rely on LOD. It is, in a sense, “how graphics works.”
