EARLY STENCIL TEST REJECTION

Early stencil rejection is used to improve throughput of a graphics processing pipeline. Early stencil rejection of some fragments may be performed prior to fragment shading using stencil test results based on a predicted stencil function. Early stencil rejection is performed when either the predicted stencil function matches the actual stencil function or the actual stencil function is a subset of the predicted stencil function. Early stencil rejection is performed without additional read accesses of a stencil buffer.