PVS

This acronym is somewhat disputed. It may stand for Potential Visibility Set, Potentially Visible Set, Potentially Viewable Set or something similar.

The PVS is the first line of defense over what geometry, entities and effects the game engine should render at any given point. Only objects within the current PVS - i.e. which are "potentially visible" - are considered for rendering, and it is cheap for the processor to decide whether or not this condition is being met.

The PVS consists of a visleaf or (more commonly) a collection of visleaves, which are created during a map's compile by VVIS.

See Also

• Controlling Geometry Visibility and Compile Times