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> "I believe this mode is used for meshes very far away or transitioning between LOD levels, it allows to save on fillrate and shading calculation by discarding

• bd 11y ago
  Yup, Witcher 3 does the same thing (thanks to that GameDev StackExchange link it finally clicked for me why Witcher 3 has that dithered look when moving around). In case it still isn't clear after reading both descriptions of what's going on: that method and a bit weird look comes from using transparency via dithering/checkerboarding when doing LOD levels transitions in deferred rendering pipeline. When rendering levels-of-details, you need to render both higher-level and lower-level quality models at the same time and blend between both, not to have sudden visual discontinuities. In deferred pipeline transparencies are tricky / costly, so doing dithering is a clever workaround, basically piercing holes in a opaque solid models. This would be quite ugly for regular transparent surfaces like glass / windshield / water, so those are rendered in a different way (usually forward pass). But for LOD transitions, which are short in duration, it can look quite acceptable (imagine superimposed images of two versions of one tree, one low-poly model, one high-poly model, further away you are from the tree, more pixels of low-poly tree you see).