Draw distance

Draw distance, also known as render distance or view distance, is a computer graphics term, defined as the maximum distance of objects in a three-dimensional scene that are drawn by the rendering engine. Polygons that lie beyond the draw distance will not be drawn to the screen.

Draw distance is defined because a processor having to render objects out to an infinite distance would slow down the application to an unacceptably slow speed. As the draw distance increases, more distant polygons need to be drawn onto the screen that would regularly be clipped. This requires more computing power; the graphic quality and realism of the scene will increase as draw distance increases, but the overall performance (frames per second) will decrease. Many games and applications will allow users to manually set the draw distance to balance performance and visuals.

Older games had far shorter draw distances, most noticeable in vast, open scenes. In many cases, once distant objects suddenly appear without warning as the camera gets closer to them, an effect known as "pop-up graphics", "pop-in", or "draw in". This is a hallmark of short draw distance, and still plagues large, open-ended games like the Grand Theft Auto series and Second Life.Formula 1 97 offered a setting so the player could choose between fixed draw distance (with variable frame rate) and fixed frame rate (with variable draw distance).

A common trick used in games to disguise a short draw distance is to obscure the area with a distance fog. Alternative methods have been developed to sidestep the problem altogether using level of detail manipulation. Black & White was one of the earlier games to use adaptive level of detail to decrease the number of polygons in objects as they moved away from the camera, allowing it to have a massive draw distance while maintaining detail in close-up views.

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