Last week I announced we were expanding visibility occlusion culling to most objects. A recent improvement made this possible and we started getting some very promising results. The following gif shows the kind of improvements we can get. Please notice the statistics panel on the top-right of the screenshot:
In some extreme cases it can even cut down rendering time in half. Especially when inside buildings.
However, this technique is not without its flaws. For example, rotating the camera really fast or opening a door too quick can trigger false negatives, causing some newly visible objects to be invisible for a whole frame. Thankfully, there are workarounds for most of the issues and that's what we're working on at the moment. It's extremely important that the system is stable and robust so we'll be testing and fixing until it's ready for everyone.
The revamped culling is available for testing now, albeit disabled by default, so you can do a test run and get an idea of the kind of performance benefits you will get. To enable it simply type "culling.world 1" on the console.