The first three chapters in this section discuss tools that help reduce the amount of scene-graph data that the graphics hardware must process. With the exception of the level-of-detail nodes, discussed in Chapter 4, all of these tools also reduce the size of the host's data management task.

This section consists of the following chapters:

Chapter 3, “Sending Efficient Graphics Data to the Hardware” discusses techniques for optimizing the graphics pipeline.

Chapter 4, “Rendering Appropriate Levels of Detail”explains how to use the OpenGL Optimizer simplification tools.

Chapter 5, “Culling Unneeded Objects From the Scene Graph”discusses organizing a scene graph to facilitate traversals, particularly view frustum culling, picking and highlighting, and occlusion culling.

Chapter 6, “Organizing the Scene Graph Spatially” explains how to structure the scene graph to reflect the spatial relationships of objects in the scene.