title: Is drawing front-to-back necessary for optimizing renders?
body: <p>I've seen the occasional article suggest ordering your vertices from nearest to furthest from the camera when sending them to OpenGL (for any of the OpenGL variants). The reason suggested by this is that OpenGL will not fully process/render a vertex if it is behind another vertex already rendered.</p>
  
  <p>Since ordering vertices by depth is a costly component of any project, as typically this ordering frequently changes, how common or necessary is such design?</p>
  
  <p>I had previously thought that OpenGL would "look" at all the vertices submitted and process its own depth buffering on them, regardless of their order, <em>before</em> rendering the entire batch. But if in fact a vertex gets rendered to the screen before another, then I can see how ordering might benefit performance.</p>
  
  <p>Is drawing front-to-back necessary for optimizing renders?</p>