NV encourages ISVs to sort geometry front-to-back to handle early Z-reject. I assume ATI’s HyperZ benefits from this (as must the Kyro series which sorts everything anyways).
However, does anyone know how the NV Depth-Modify Texture-Shader affects this?
Will early Z-reject clip pixels who may not be rejected post-Depth-modify?
This is not as much of an API question as it is general HW, since in DX8, there is also a Depth-Modify option for PS1.4, (however, it isn’t exposed for GeForce3 which sadly only supports PS1.1…[thus NV-OGL enables more GF3 features than DX8 :] )
Anyways, its interesting to notice how we’ve gone from
-:-Software-Rasterized
()Back-to-Front Painter’s Algorithm
to
()Front-to-Back Scan-line
and
-:-Hardware
()Texture/State sorted
to
()Front-to-Back “Early Z-Reject”
to hopefully
()“HP-Occlusion-Tests” or “Hiearchical Z-Culling”