i''ve begun reading the opengl programming guide and came to a point where the book mentioned that values closer to the near clipping plane have greater depth accuracy than those nearer the far clipping plane (with perpspective projections). the reasoning behind this was because during the perspective divide the z values were scaled non-linearly. i looked online a little further into the subject, and what i figured is that the z-values are scaled in such a way because that''s the only matrix transformation that will produce the desired change of the perspective canonical view volume to parallel canonical view volume (i don''t know any linear algebra except how to multiply matrices so i might be wrong). my question is then, why must we HAVE to use a matrix tranformation. why can''t we just alter the x, y (w?) values and leave the z value unaltered?