A trip through the Graphics Pipeline 2011

This is the index page for a series of blog posts I’m currently writing about the D3D/OpenGL graphics pipelines as actually implemented by GPUs. A lot of this is well known among graphics programmers, and there’s tons of papers on various bits and pieces of it, but one bit I’ve been annoyed with is that while there’s both broad overviews and very detailed information on individual components, there’s not much in between, and what little there is is mostly out of date.

This series is intended for graphics programmers that know a modern 3D API (at least OpenGL 2.0+ or D3D9+) well and want to know how it all looks under the hood. It’s not a description of the graphics pipeline for novices; if you haven’t used a 3D API, most if not all of this will be completely useless to you. I’m also assuming a working understanding of contemporary hardware design – you should at the very least know what registers, FIFOs, caches and pipelines are, and understand how they work. Finally, you need a working understanding of at least basic parallel programming mechanisms. A GPU is a massively parallel computer, there’s no way around it.