5.4 Overview of the Rendering Pipeline

5.4 Overview of the Rendering Pipeline

Given a geometric description of a 3D scene with a positioned and oriented virtual camera, the rendering pipeline refers to the entire sequence of steps necessary to generate a 2D image based on what the virtual camera sees. Figure 5.11 shows a diagram of the stages that make up the rendering pipeline, as well as memory resources off to the side. An arrow going from the memory pool to a stage means the stage can access the memory as input; for example, the pixel shader stage may need to read data from a texture resource stored in memory. An arrow going from a stage to memory means the stage writes to memory; for example, the output merger stage writes data to textures such as the back buffer and depth/stencil buffer. Observe that the arrow for the output merger stage is bidirectional. The subsequent sections give an overview of each stage of the rendering pipeline.