Talk:Viewing frustum

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"Often, the far plane is placed infinitely far away from the camera so all objects within the frustum are drawn regardless of their distance from the camera." This sounds wrong (for realtime 3d graphics), as with an infinite far-plane you'd get massive z-fighting after a certain distance. Bitplane 17:41, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Engines don't have to use standard depth sorting to get the z-order. For applications where detail is more important than speed they may do the sorting manually, and draw things in the desired order. This method has other problems obviously, but it can still be done in real time. You could also raise the amount of bits used for the depth buffer. A lot of people use 8, but 16 bits is commonly supported (AFAIK), and 24 is also available even on cards a few years old. That gives you an exponentially bigger depth before Z-fighting kicks in. In other words, z-fighting is a problem with infinite far planes, but it's not insurmountable. Prgrmr@wrk 15:08, 25 February 2007 (UTC)