Glossary · Rendering
Level of Detail (LOD) Culling
Also known as: LOD, Level-of-Detail Rendering.
A rendering optimization that draws fewer details (or skips elements entirely) when the user is zoomed out, keeping frame times low on large graphs.
When a graph contains 10,000+ nodes and the user zooms out far enough that each node is only a few pixels wide, drawing labels, badges, and rich node decorations is wasted work — the user cannot see them. Level-of-detail culling progressively simplifies the rendering as zoom decreases: at high zoom, every node and edge is drawn fully; at medium zoom, labels disappear; at low zoom, only node shapes are drawn; below a threshold, nodes off-screen are culled entirely.
LOD lets graph renderers stay smooth (60fps) on graphs that would otherwise overwhelm the GPU or main thread. TopoKit ships a 4-tier LOD pipeline by default and exposes the current scale to custom node-rendering callbacks so authors can tier their own details.
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