Direct3D Rendering Pipeline
The Microsoft® Direct3D® rendering pipeline is a series of processing stages that specify the behavior of the vertex transform and lighting pipeline, and the pixel and texture blending pipeline.
When you design a 3-D application, you can define the world in any units you find convenient, from microns to miles. Your application passes a description of that world to Direct3D. This description includes the sizes and relative positions of all the objects and light sources in your world and the position and orientation of the viewer. Direct3D transforms this data into a series of pixels on the screen. The first step of this process — the transformation of the geometry that you supply into a two-dimensional image — is the geometry pipeline, sometimes called the transformation pipeline. After vertex processing, pixel data is used to perform multitexturing and fog blending. Then alpha, stencil, and depth tests are performed. Finally, frame-buffer blending is done by the rasterizer.
The following topics provide a Direct3D-centered approach to the complete rendering pipeline. The topics introduce key concepts and make parallels from those concepts to their counterparts in the Direct3D API. The fixed-function processing section discusses techniques familiar to developers who have used earlier versions of Microsoft DirectX®.
See Also
Last updated on Thursday, April 08, 2004
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