Abstract: Hierarchical culling can be used during shadow generation by using a stencil buffer generated from a light view of the eye-view depth buffer. The stencil buffer indicates which regions visible from an eye-view are also visible from a light view. A pixel shader can determine if any object could cast a shadow by comparing a proxy geometry for the object with visible regions in the stencil buffer. If the proxy geometry does not cast any shadow on a visible region in the stencil buffer, then the object corresponding to the proxy geometry is excluded from a list of objects for which shadows are to be rendered.