Early 3D games are primarily limited on how they handle occlusion. If your scene is designed favorably(e.g. wireframe spaceships), you can ignore occlusion, but

Early 3D games are primarily limited on how they handle occlusion. If your scene is designed favorably(e.g. wireframe spaceships), you can ignore occlusion, but that doesn't describe most interesting scenes. Leaderboard is using a kind of painter's algorithm to do everything, which is flexible but requires using overdraw, and by itself, will produce rendering errors in many scenes because the depth will be sorted per object or per triangle, versus per pixel. Filled triangle rasterization is particularly expensive to compute and requires a fair amount of numeric precision, both of which compound the issue of using overdraw. Fractalus does not use these techniques for terrain - although the exact implementation is idiosyncratic[1], it's ultimately filling an outline that defines the horizon, and then adds texture to the landscape with dot patterns. Bear in mind, it doesn't render to the full screen either, it's mostly HUD, while Leaderboard is a little more expansive. [1] A similar technique is described for Captain Blood: http://bringerp.free.fr/RE/CaptainBlood/main.php5 http://bringerp.free.fr/RE/CaptainBlood/main.php5