BioWare Licenses Umbra Occlusion Culling For Dragon Age

Helsinki-based Umbra Software has announced that BioWare is using its occlusion culling technology in several franchises including Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Dragon Age: Origins, which releases this week, is said to use Umbra's GPU-based optimization technology. Occlusion culling determines areas that cannot be seen by the player at a given moment and removes the need for the game engine to render those polygons, potentially improving the engine's efficiency by a considerable amount. In theory, developers can directly use that rendering advantage to allow for a higher polygon budget. "BioWare has proven their excellence with a multitude of award-winning projects," said Umbra Software marketing VP Farhad Taherazer. "We are proud to have a studio with their track record recognize our abilities with a broad integration of our tech, it gives us credibility in this market place and puts us closer to becoming an industry standard." In addition to Dragon Age and Mass Effect -- presumably referring to next year's Mass Effect 2 -- Umbra says its technology has been licensed for "other future titles" from BioWare.