After the last post about texture samplers, we’re now back in the 3D frontend. We’re done with vertex shading, so now we can start actually rendering stuff, right? Well, not quite. You see, there’s a bunch still left to do before we actually start ra…

Welcome back to what’s going to be the last “official” part of this series – I’ll do more GPU-related posts in the future, but this series is long enough already. We’ve been touring all the regular parts of the graphics pipeline, down to different le…

Welcome back! This time, we’ll look into what is perhaps the “poster boy” feature introduced with the D3D11 / Shader 5.x hardware generation: Tessellation. This one is interesting both because it’s a fun topic, and because it marks the first time in…

Welcome back.     Last time, we dove into bottom end of the pixel pipeline. This time, we’ll switch back to the middle of the pipeline to look at what is probably the most visible addition that came with D3D10: Geometry Shaders.     But first, some m…

In this part, I’ll be dealing with the first half of pixel processing: dispatch and actual pixel shading. In fact, this is really what most graphics programmer think about when talking about pixel processing; the alpha blend and late Z stages we’ll e…

In this installment, I’ll be talking about the (early) Z pipeline and how it interacts with rasterization. Like the last part, the text won’t proceed in actual pipeline order; again, I’ll describe the underlying algorithms first, and then fill in the…

Welcome back. Last part was about vertex shaders, with some coverage of GPU shader units in general. Mostly, they’re just vector processors, but they have access to one resource that doesn’t exist in other vector architectures: Texture samplers. They…

At this point, we’ve sent draw calls down from our app all the way through various driver layers and the command processor; now, finally we’re actually going to do some graphics processing on it! In this part, I’ll look at the vertex pipeline. But be…

Welcome back. Last part was about vertex shaders, with some coverage of GPU shader units in general. Mostly, they’re just vector processors, but they have access to one resource that doesn’t exist in other vector architectures: Texture samplers. They…

It’s been awhile since I posted something here, and I figured I might use this spot to explain some general points about graphics hardware and software as of 2011; you can find functional descriptions of what the graphics stack in your PC does, but u…