title: Early Z-test / depth-test in DirectX 11
body: <p>As a DirectX noob i'm trying to wrap my head around depth buffers and specifically how pixel shaders are called for obscured pixels.</p>
  
  <p>From what i understand, the rasterizer calls the pixel shader for each pixel that is covering the primitive beeing drawn, then later in the output merger stage, the output merger checks the depth buffer and either discards, writes or blends the pixel in the back buffer.</p>
  
  <p>This seems wasteful though if i'm rendering a simple opaque object in front of a very complex one, so it seems it would be useful to have the rasterizer check the depthmap Before even calling the pixel shaders for the complex object.</p>
  
  <p>Doing research i've found references to early Z test / conservative Z testing and so on, but there also seems to be very little documentation about it. i looked for a way to configure that on the rasterizer state desc object, but i only found anything like that on the OM state desc.</p>
  
  <p>It also seems like this was possible to set with SetRenderState in DX9 (i have no experience with DX9 either though)</p>
  
  <p>From my research it seems like this is something some hardware just does if i render objects front to back, is that correct? How can i even tell? With all the Control DirectX gives you it seems weird that there is no control over this, as it seems to be a good optimization :)</p>
  
  <p>Any info or references on this is appriciated</p>