Systems, methods, and computer-readable storage media for rendering three-dimensional scenes including transparent surfaces are described, including two techniques for efficient rendering of transparent surfaces that exploit partial ordering in the scene geometry. The first (hybrid layer peeling) may combine unordered meshes with ordered meshes in an efficient way, and may be well suited for rendering scenes such as volumes with embedded transparent meshes. The second (coherent layer peeling) may efficiently detect and render correctly sorted fragment sequences for a given pixel in one iteration, allowing for a smaller number of passes than traditional depth peeling. Pre-sorting and/or periodic sorting of some or all of the surfaces in a scene may be performed, but perfect sorting may not be required. The methods may be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination thereof, such as by program instructions executable on one or more CPUs and/or GPUs.