Access depth buffer without creating shader that extracts the z-depth of each pixel

Graphics
1

Hello,

is it possible to access the depth buffer after every frame without a shader that extracts the z-value of each pixel?
The reason is, I would have had to render the entire scene twice: first for the depth, and second for the real image.

Is there any workaround?

Best regards.

2

no the depthbuffer resides on the GPU and is not sent back from there.

but you can totally just pass 2 rendertargets and render depth and color at the same time. This is commonly used in Deferred Shading (where even more information is generated during one pass)

1 Like
3

Ahh, that makes sense.
(-: