render with const depth value

Question

This is a question that may have an answer that differs for vanilla desktop GL and GL ES 2.0 (and wishful thinking is that ES 3.0 would have the same answer as vanilla GL).

What I'm doing is rendering a cubemap with a FS quad and I'd like to know if there's a way to specify a constant depth value for an entire render call rather than to get involved at the fragment shader level, in hopes of chasing a little bit of performance as well as flexibility in that I can use the same shader for drawing to different const depth values.

As for why it might benefit performance, the note at the bottom here offers some ideas, such as early-z testing... I suppose realistically if I emit a constant distant fragment depth, then early-z can still happen while maintaining the flexibility of pixel-programmable depth in general (necessary for proper impostors as shown). In this case I may be splitting hairs unnecessarily at this point. However that note does mention that if I can avoid specifying gl_FragDepth, I should, but it'd be up to the driver whether it will do something smart if I e.g. set gl_FragDepth to a constant.

As an example I could render my 3D scene, then set depth draw value to maximum, keep depth test on, and then render a fullscreen quad for my cubemap skybox, and it would just do the right thing.

Otherwise, choices include:

• render skybox first with depth testing switched off, then render scene
• use a fragment shader for the skybox that specifies the requisite depth value (this may very well just be the answer)

Answer 1

Tile based GPUs usually prefers you to call glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT | GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT) with depth at 1.0 in order to do a fast tile clear. Then render your skybox as an opaque quad with depth test "less" and no blending like any other opaque geometry.

The driver usually uses the glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT | GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT) call to know it can start over with a completely fresh frame buffer, throwing away all previous data.

If you do not clear the color buffer it will need to reload the old color data from the previous frame buffer and it wont be able to pre-clear the internal tile rendering memory to a preset value (glClearColor, glClearDepth, glClearStencil) using specialized hardware.

If you need to render a primitive at a fixed depth force the z & w values in the vertex shader, do not do it in the pixel shader.

Setting the depth in the pixel shader, even to a constant value, forces pixel shader code to be run to calculate the depth rather than use the interpolator's special hardware/routine that is already optimized.

Even if a few drivers optimize for the very unique and extremely rare case of a forced const depth most drivers wont. For all the other devices you'll have to switch back to setting the depth in the vertex shader anyway which means a lot of wasted work just to save an insignificant fraction of gpu time on the skybox if anything at all.

Cheers,