depth [min-max] accumulation information

Hi,

I need to have something like a
GL_occlusion_query that, instead of counting accepted fragment would return the maximal depth value accepted.

As far i know, such extension doesn’t seem to exis. I find a multipass way to do this in the following article:
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~dm/

But maybe some of you have other idea for making it fast.

Cheers,
Damien.