Do a VERY rough cull and throw your objects at opengl. Don't shag around doing fine culling and don't even think about doing clipping.

Unless your data sets are massive, or you've come up with some brilliant algorithm, don't bother with occlusion culling either.

With the processing power of modern gpu's you want to do as much processing there as possible. It's all about achieving parallelism (?). If at any time the cpu or gpu is sat idle then you have a problem.

But remember, the profiler is your friend and Mac OS X has THE best profiling tools for graphics programming.

* ye shall start taking advantage of hardware T&L by tesselating your objects nicely
* ye shall only do coarse culling in software as your polycounts will be high
* ye shall use fewer and instead bigger textures per distinct object
* witness that you now draw many polys per object, and you by design never have to change textures during that
* witness that you are fill limited anyway
* ye shall forfeit the belief of being limited by state changing
* make it so that you can fill faster by reducing overdraw or making it cheaper
* make it so that the hardware can discard more pixels early
* render front to back
* thank you


Pin this to the wall above your mac. In time, it will make sense.