Open main menu
Home
Random
Recent changes
Special pages
Community portal
Preferences
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Incubator escapee wiki
Search
User menu
Talk
Dark mode
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Editing
Graphics pipeline
(section)
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
== Shader == {{Main|Shader}} <div class="skin-invert-image">{{wide image|3D-Pipeline.svg|1000px|alt=There are 11 phases, each enumerated here. Vertex shader and 3D code are the input into animation and transformation. The second phase is the hull shader, tesselation, and domain shader. The third phase is the geometry shader. The fourth phase is the perspective transformation. The fifth phase is the clipping and backface culling. The 6th phase is triangle rasterization, which outputs texture coordinates. The seventh phase, texture cache, starts separately and takes textures as input. The seventh phase and the texture coordinates go to the 8th phase, texture filtering. From the 6th phase and the output of the 8th phase, texels go to the 9th phase, early Z, and pixel shading, which also takes a pixel shader as input. The 10th phase is Z-test, alpha blending, and anti-aliasing. Then the 11th phase is post-processing, which outputs a back-to-back buffer.}}</div> Classic graphics cards are still relatively close to the graphics pipeline. With increasing demands on the [[Graphics processing unit|GPU]], restrictions were gradually removed to create more flexibility. Modern graphics cards use a freely programmable, shader-controlled pipeline, which allows direct access to individual processing steps. To relieve the main processor, additional processing steps have been moved to the pipeline and the GPU. The most important shader units are vertex [[shaders]], geometry shaders, and pixel shaders. The [[Unified shader model|Unified Shader]] has been introduced to take full advantage of all units. This gives a single large pool of shader units. As required, the pool is divided into different groups of shaders. A strict separation between the shader types is therefore no longer useful. It is also possible to use a so-called compute-shader to perform any calculations off the display of a graphic on the GPU. The advantage is that they run very parallel, but there are limitations. These universal calculations are also called [[general-purpose computing on graphics processing units]], or '''GPGPU''' for short. [[Mesh shader]]s are a recent addition, aiming to overcome the bottlenecks of the geometry pipeline fixed layout.<ref>[https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/advanced-api-performance-mesh-shaders/ Advanced API Performance: Mesh Shaders]</ref>
Edit summary
(Briefly describe your changes)
By publishing changes, you agree to the
Terms of Use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)