| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer and video games |
| Founded | Helsinki, Finland (2007) |
| Headquarters | Helsinki, Finland |
| Website | Umbra Software |
Umbra Software Ltd. is a graphics software technology company founded 2007 in Helsinki, Finland. Umbra Software specializes in occlusion culling, visibility and rendering optimization technology and provides middleware for videogames running on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC, iOS and other platforms.
Umbra’s technology is being used in many of today’s biggest videogames such as Mass Effect 2, Lords of the Rings Online, Alan Wake, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, Grandia Online, EVE Online, Free Realms and Dragon Age II & Dragon Age Origins.
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Umbra Software was spun off from Hybrid Graphics in 2005. Umbra Software acquired Hybrid Graphics' dPVS and continued its development. The next generation of this technology, named Umbra, was a hardware accelerated occlusion culling middleware. Umbra was released in September 2007. In 2009, Umbra Occlusion Booster was released and it was optimized for multi-core systems such as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PCs.
In 2011 Umbra is working on Umbra3. Besides visibility optimization, the purpose of Umbra 3 is to increase frame rate and ease game development. Umbra 3 does this by optimizing critical parts of a game such as rendering and by providing tools to help with content streaming and game logic.
Umbra 3 builds an internal representation of a game scene and uses this data at runtime to perform efficient queries that can be used to e.g. determine the set of visible objects for the player or determine the set of objects that are within a given distance from a point.
In March 2010, Unity Technologies announced that the next release of Unity would feature built-in occlusion culling preprocessing powered by Umbra. Unity Pro ships with Umbra's occlusion culling solution.[1]
Umbra Software has developed two products: Umbra Occlusion Booster.[2] and Umbra3.
Umbra Occlusion Booster is GPU accelerated occlusion culling middleware for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. This product was released in 2009.
Umbra3 is available for evaluation since spring 2011 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, PC, iOS and other platforms on request. Umbra3 integrates easily with Unreal Engine 3, Unity and Gamebryo as well as custom developed game engines. Umbra3 includes an improved version of Umbra Occlusion Booster now known simply as Umbra OB.
Umbra products have been shipped with over 20 million sold games on several platforms such as Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, Mac and iPhone, to name a few. You can find a list of games using Umbra at the company's website.[3]