How do games deal with Z sorting partially transparent foliage textures? I was busy implementing basic transparency in a prototype I'm working on when something occurred to me. In order for a given texture's transparency to work as expected, the (semi )transparent texture must be drawn after whatever is behind it, right? Well, if we take for example a tree or shrub in a game like Skyrim, the texture(s) that make up the foliage on that tree or shrub must include some transparency somewhere, right? A vertex perfect leaf model would be far too resource intensive. But the player can move around, and sometimes through, any plant at will, thus changing the relative position of all textures to the camera. Doesn't this mean that the game has to constantly Z sort all textures, both between models and even within a single plant model, whenever the player moves (so potentially every single frame)? Isn't that very resource intensive? How do games with lots of partially transparent textures deal with this?