Nonrendering

Nonrendering describes a state or condition in which data, components, or processes are present or active but do not produce visible output in the final display. The concept is used across software domains to distinguish between items that are merely prepared or kept for future use and those that contribute to the current visual result. Nonrendering can be intentional, as a performance optimization, or incidental, as a side effect of the application's architecture.

In user interfaces and web development, elements may be considered nonrendering when they are not painted to the screen. For example, elements styled with display: none are removed from the render tree and are not painted; frameworks may also render components that return null or false, yielding no UI nodes. Techniques like lazy rendering and virtualization deliberately keep offscreen or out-of-view content nonrendering until required.

In graphics and game engines, nonrendering is common in offscreen rendering, where scene data is drawn to textures or buffers that are not immediately presented to the display. This supports post-processing, shadow maps, or multi-pass effects and allows subsequent steps to reuse results.

In performance and accessibility considerations, nonrendering helps reduce CPU/GPU load and memory usage but can create synchronization challenges. Developers must ensure that nonrendering content becomes visible when needed and remains accessible to assistive technologies, or is properly excluded from the accessibility tree.

The term is not a formal standard with a single definition, and its meaning can vary by context, but it generally denotes the separation of data or components from their visual rendering.