Conservative Depth Output (and Other Lesser-Known D3D11 Features)

D3D11 came with a whole bunch of new big-ticket features that received plenty of attention and publicity. Things like tessellation, compute shaders, and multithreaded command submission have the subject of many presentations, discussion, and sample apps. However D3D11 also came with a few other features that allow more “traditional” rendering approaches to benefit from the increased programmability of graphics hardware.