## 21.2. Tessellator Patch Discard

A patch is discarded by the tessellator if any relevant outer tessellation level is less than or equal to zero.

Patches will also be discarded if any relevant outer tessellation level corresponds to a floating-point NaN (not a number) in implementations supporting NaN.

No new primitives are generated and the tessellation evaluation shader is not executed for patches that are discarded. For `Quads`, all four outer levels are relevant. For `Triangles` and `IsoLines`, only the first three or two outer levels, respectively, are relevant. Negative inner levels will not cause a patch to be discarded; they will be clamped as described below.