Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

3 The Rendering Pipeline

The Direct3D 11 Rendering Pipeline is the mechanism used to process memory resources into a rendered image with the GPU. The pipeline itself is made up of a number of smaller logical units, called pipeline stages. Data is processed by progressing through the pipeline one stage at a time and is manipulated in some way at each stage. By understanding how the individual stages of the pipeline operate, and the semantics for using them, we can use the pipeline as a whole to implement a wide variety of algorithms that execute in real time.

As GPUs have become increasingly powerful with each new architecture generation, the size and capabilities of the pipeline have expanded significantly. In addition, the complexity and configurability ...