Can adjust rendering order improve performance much?

Hi, I would like to know if rendering opaque surfaces in front-to-back order (closer ones first, more distant ones last) can improve performance much. By 'opaque' I mean surfaces for which the DepthWriteMask is set to one in the depth-stencil state. I think no matte we adjust order or not, the pixel shader needs to be performed. The difference is the output merge stage. Does this improve performance much? Thanks. YL