Improving Shadows and Reflections via the Stencil Buffer
Mark J. Kilgard · 1999
For too many game developers, the above statement sums up their approach to 3D hardwareacceleration. A game programmer might turn on some fog and maybe throw in some transparency, but that’s often the limit. The question is whether that is enough anymore for a game to stand out visually from the crowd. Now everybody’s using 3D hardware-acceleration, and everybody’s slinging textured polygons around, and, frankly, as a result, most 3D games look more or less the same.