Simple depth stencil buffer question

Quote:

Or is what I'm asking just not feasible?

Nope, it won't happen.. Not in hardware anyway, the refrast supports all formats and is run entirely on the CPU so your depth-stencil is technically in system memory...

I'm sure that if you were clever you could implement this sort of a feature (for example using a pixel shader to write the depth/stencil to a render target), but that would just be silly.

At a guess, any hardware you could succesfully emulate on would probably support the feature (in hardware) anyway thus making it pointless.

Also, most modern hardware is optimized for depth/stencil buffer reading/writing (e.g. ATI's Hyper-Z technology).

Just out of curiousity, why do you want to do this?

hth
Jack

There was no specific reason this came up actually, but the more I thought about it the more it didn't make sense. Having the depth/stencil buffer in software for use by the hardware kind of defeats its purpose.