Yes, and this kind of issue comes up a lot in computing when trying to find deep optimizations: If you make a processing pipeline that drops information and red

Yes, and this kind of issue comes up a lot in computing when trying to find deep optimizations: If you make a processing pipeline that drops information and reduces quality as it goes along, you can always turn that into a speed-up, but some features become hard and others become impossible. So in the end most pipelines cohere into an unexciting but generalized-enough solution that retains some extra data, while the cool hacks and approximations are left as special cases used to get an effect in specific applications(and the history of real-time 3D is, in essence, a history of progressively fewer cool hacks and more generalizations).