The techniques described herein improve the efficiency of graphics processing pipelines by culling primitives received for rendering before sending those primitives to the graphics processing pipeline for rendering. Further, the culling technique makes use of a transform shader program that is automatically generated based on a vertex shader program to be executed as part of the graphics processing pipeline. Basing the transform shader program on the vertex shader program allows culling to be done based on customized vertex position transforms that can be defined by a programmer. Further, because the cull shader program and transform shader program are automatically generated,
a programmer does not need to explicitly invoke primitive culling operations, which simplifies the application development process and reduces cost and time for development of software that utilizes the graphics processing pipeline. "
