Direct3D 11 Overview

Here is a first draft for the data flow in the DirectX 11 rendering pipeline:

And here is the DirectCompute overview:


I would consider those now beta.

Direct3D 10 Overview

I started working on a Direct3D 10 overview that only covers one page. Here is the latest version.

Please note that this overview has nothing to do with the way the hardware works. It is just a diagram that shows the data flow and the usage of the Direct3D 10 API to stream the data through several logical stages that might be represented in hardware by one unit. If you are interested in the actual hardware design, I would recommend reading

A Closer Look at GPUs

New Links

I updated my list of links on the right side with some of the websites I keep an eye on.
I never met Brian Karis but he has a few very forward thinking posts on his blog. The same is true for Pierre Terdiman. He covers many non-graphics related tasks and I believe I read his blog and former website since 7 years (?). Aurelio Reis has some cool procedural stuff on his blog. Simon Green worked on some of the coolest stuff that you can find in the NVIDIA SDK. His blog has some interesting entries on how the GPUs nowadays can render CG movie content in real-time while CPUs still need a lot more time to do the same. Then I also added Mike Acton's blog. I wonder how I could have forgotten this as often as Mike and I met in the last few months. He is certainly one of the SPU and Multi-core programming authorities in the industry. I especially like his opinion regarding C++ and data-centric design. Lots of people repeated this mantra in the last two years but I heard it from him before.