3 ms·

You could avoid a full screen clear by using the y-buffer to draw in sky segments after rendering terrain.

• swiftcoder 4mo ago
  You still need to have some sort of mask to tell you which pixels have not yet been written this frame
  • knome 4mo ago
    that's what the y-buffer is that the article mentions in the front-to-back rendering section. it tracks how tall each columns write is so you can use it to only write the diff between it and the voxel behind it, skipping writing anything at all if the voxel behind is shorter than the current height. So once you're done rendering front-to-back, you've got a y-buffer of highest-writes you can slap your blue sky across from highest-to-screentop on each line, avoiding the need to clear by write the sky to the full screen before starting the render.
    • swiftcoder 4mo ago
      yes, I guess you can get away with only clearing the y buffer, rather than the whole screen