[teraflop]

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The parent commenter is correct that modern game engines don't need to sort polygons to render them correctly (with some exceptions e.g. transparent objects), and doing so at a fine-grained level is generally not worth the CPU cost. Especially since the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU can be a bottleneck, so if possible you want to only upload the level geometry once instead of having to rearrange it on every frame.

Game engines can of course still do their own coarse-grained occlusion culling, in order to reduce the amount of geometry that needs to be processed per frame. And there can still be a benefit to approximately sorting objects: if you draw objects in approximate front-to-back order, then a shader can do "early depth testing" and skip the expensive shading computations for pixels that are occluded by already-drawn polygons.

[gary_0]

Even for modern games that don't care about depth ordering, they still tend to render first-person weapons or third-person characters first, and the sky last, just because it's an easy way to skip a bunch of overdraw, so why not?