Neither of the techniques I described are in any way related to lighting.

In order to write something to the stencil buffer (without card-specific hacks), you need to render something, because the standard stencil buffer formats are not lockable and therefore you can't get direct access to their surface memory from within your program. Rendering can be thought as an indirect write access.

Neither of the techniques I described are in any way related to lighting.

In order to write something to the stencil buffer (without card-specific hacks), you need to render something, because the standard stencil buffer formats are not lockable and therefore you can't get direct access to their surface memory from within your program.