Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

3.10 Rasterizer

The geometry shader stage marks the final point in the pipeline that deals strictly with geometric data. Regardless of whether it receives data directly from the vertex shader stage, the domain shader stage, or the geometry shader stage, the geometric pipeline data is fed into the rasterizer stage. The location of the rasterizer stage is highlighted in Figure 3.45.

The primary purpose of this stage is to convert the geometric data into a regularly sampled representation that can later be applied to a render target. This sampling process is referred to as rasterization, and it maps individual primitives to a format appropriate for storage in a texture resource. The result of rasterization is to produce a number of fragments that ...