Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

1 Overview of Direct3D 11

The Direct3D 11 rendering API has extended Direct3D in several key areas, while retaining much of the API structure that was introduced with Direct3D 10. This chapter will provide an introduction to Direct3D 11 and will discuss some of these changes to the API. It begins with a brief description of how Direct3D is organized and how it interacts with a GPU installed in your computer. This will provide an idea of what the various software components involved in using Direct3D must do to perform some rendering.

Next is a discussion of the rendering pipeline, with a brief overview of each of the pipeline stages. Then we look at the new additions to the API that allow the GPU to be used for general computation, in addition ...