It’s actually quite common to use a 24bit fixed point format for the depth buffer, leaving 8 bits for the stencil buffer. GPUs do a lot of fixed point to float

It’s actually quite common to use a 24bit fixed point format for the depth buffer, leaving 8 bits for the stencil buffer. GPUs do a lot of fixed point to float conversions for the different texture and vertex formats since memory bandwidth is more expensive than compute.