Abstract: We present a visibility method that takes advantage of the graphics hardware to give fast answers to visibility queries. Our visibility method is designed to solve two types of visibility queries: point-based visibility queries, where several visibility queries share the same origin, and plane-based visibility queries, where several visibility queries have their origins on the same plane. Both occur frequently in global iluumination algorithms. Combining the speed given by graphics hardware with a software heuristic to avoid reliability problems, our visibility method is significantly faster than ray-casting, and still gives the same results.