Beginning XNA 3.0 Game Programming: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 9Rendering Pipeline, Shaders, and Effects

In this chapter, you'll learn some of the concepts related to the rendering pipeline, shaders, and effects. The rendering pipeline is responsible for rendering a 3D scene into a 2D image, which can then be drawn on the screen. You can use shaders to program some stages of the rendering pipeline, and use effects to describe a combination of shaders and configurations for the fixed stages of the rendering pipeline. This flexibility allows you to create custom visual effects, improving the visual aspect of the final image.

Rendering Pipeline

To visualize a 3D scene on the screen, the scene must be transformed into a 2D image. The process that transforms a 3D scene into an image is called rendering ...