Today I made a strange observation doing some timing tests with glFinish to check how long it takes the hardware to clear a depth+stencil and a color buffer. From various places we know that depth+stencil has stuff like HiZ, Z-Compression and what not else going on which is supposed to speed up rendering. So depth+stencil should be clearable by simply setting flags of tiles to "cleared" which should be faster than clearing all pixels like in the color buffer case. But the numbers look way different. This is what I got:

Clear depth+stencil buffer (32-bit): 800ys

Clear 1 color buffer (64-bit, RGBA16F): 150ys

As you can see clearing a floating point color buffer is more than 4 times faster than clearing a depth+stencil. So I'm wondering how depth+stencil clearing can be sped up. Any ideas? Here is what I use for the test case:

glColorMask( GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE, GL_TRUE );
glDepthMask( GL_TRUE );

glClearBufferfi( GL_DEPTH_STENCIL, 0, 1.0f, 0 );
glClearBufferfv( GL_COLOR, 0, &clearColor[ 0 ] ) );

Timing is over the individual glClearBuffer* calls each accompanied by a glFinish to get the total time required for a full clear. How can it be clearing the depth+stencil buffer is over 4 times slower than clearing a color buffer?