Optimal Depth Buffer Usage for Large-scale Games

With large-scale scene rendering, developers often decide to use a 32-bit floating point depth buffer format, rather than the usual 24-bit integer format. However, against expectations, this does not result in noticeable precision improvement when using a standard perspective projection, because the 32-bit floating point format only has 23-bits of mantissa.

One solution is to change the depth buffer mapping to ensure the depth values are distributed more evenly. This requires changing OpenGL’s default clip space Z projection, which maps values to [-1...1] range, to [0...1] using the GL_EXT_clip_control extension. Depth buffers must then be cleared to zero, and depth comparison will need to be changed to GL_GREATER. Finally, the projection matrix needs to be changed so that far values are projected to 0 and near values are projected to 1.

With this method, the usual D24S8 format may be enough for most games. For even more precision, use a D32F with a separate stencil buffer, although this will use more memory.