Occlusion Culling System For Optimized Rendering On Nintendo 64

Kaze Emanuar, who specializes in various Super Mario 64 technical videos, recently showcased a curious rendering technique, apparently a form of occlusion culling, that was never implemented during the Nintendo 64's original era. Thanks to Sauraen, this method is now possible within game ROMs through, yes, ROM hacking. The optimization skips drawing certain parts of a 3D model that fall completely within a defined screen-space area, which, according to Kaze, resulted in a 10-20% performance boost in some areas.

F3DEX3 introduces a set of performance profiling tools in the form of performance counters. These counters report cycle counts for various operations or track the number of items processed of specific types. Across multiple microcode versions, there are a total of 21 performance counters available. We can't really go into detail here, but if you're interested in this topic, check out F3DEX3 here and visit Kaze Emanuar's YouTube channel:

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