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tracychen

In real-time rendering, should we render objects closer to the camera first?

Qwerty

Would the order of rendering affect the performance?

motoole2

@tracychen @Qwerty Typically, the answer is no. Referring to the standard graphics pipeline, there are no obvious computational gains to be made by rendering the closest triangles first or last. This is because triangles are processed completely independently from one another, up until it is time to perform the depth test and write values to the color/depth buffers.

That being said, one can affect performance by doing the depth test before processing triangle fragments. This is referred to as an early depth test. In this case, rendering the closest objects first could be a little faster, assuming that objects further are being occluded and won't pass the depth test.