The irregular Z-buffer is an algorithm designed to solve the visibility problem in real-time 3-d computer graphics. It is related to the classical Z-buffer in that it maintains a depth value for each image sample and uses these to determine which geometric elements of a scene are visible. The key difference, however, between the classical Z-buffer and the irregular Z-buffer is that the latter allows arbitrary placement of image samples in the image plane, whereas the former requires samples to be arranged in a regular grid.
These depth samples are explicitly stored in a two-dimensional spatial data structure. During rasterization, triangles are projected onto the image plane as usual, and the data structure is queried to determine which samples overlap each projected triangle. Finally, for each overlapping sample, the standard Z-compare and (conditional) frame buffer update are performed.
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