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"What Is" Articles for Sprites and Effects

  • Article

These articles provide a brief introduction into graphics pipeline functionality.

In This Section

  • What Is Antialiasing?
    Antialiasing is a technique for softening or blurring sharp edges so they appear less jagged when rendered.
  • What Is a Back Buffer?
    A back buffer is a render target whose contents will be sent to the device when GraphicsDevice.Present is called.
  • What Is Blend State?
    Blend state controls how color and alpha values are blended when combining rendered data with existing render target data.
  • What Is Color Blending?
    Color blending mixes two colors together to produce a third color.
  • What Is a Depth Buffer?
    A depth buffer contains per-pixel floating-point data for the z depth of each pixel rendered. A depth buffer may also contain stencil data which can be used to do more complex rendering such as simple shadows or outlines.
  • What Is Depth Stencil State?
    Depth stencil state controls how the depth buffer and the stencil buffer are used.
  • What Is a Depth Texture?
    A depth texture, also known as a shadow map, is a texture that contains the data from the depth buffer for a particular scene.
  • What Is an Effect?
    An effect initializes the graphics pipeline for performing transforms, lighting, applying textures, and adding per-pixel visual effects such as a glow or a lens flare. Under the covers, an effect implements at least one shader for processing vertices and at least one shader for processing pixels.
  • What Is a Model Bone?
    A model bone is a matrix that represents the position of a mesh as it relates to other meshes in a 3D model.
  • What Is a Profile?
    A profile is a feature set that is implemented in hardware. The Reach profile implements high-level shader language (HLSL) Shader Model 2.0 and the HiDef profile implements HLSL Shader Model 3.0.
  • What Is Rasterizer State?
    Rasterizer state determines how to render 3D data such as position, color, and texture onto a 2D surface.
  • What Is a Render Target?
    A render target is a memory buffer for rendering pixels. One common use for a render target is offscreen rendering.
  • What Is Sampler State?
    Sampler state determines how texture data is sampled using texture addressing modes, filtering, and level of detail.
  • What Is a Stencil Buffer?
    A stencil buffer contains per-pixel integer data which is used to add more control over which pixels are rendered. A stencil buffer can also be used in combination with a depth buffer to do more complex rendering such as simple shadows or outlines.
  • What are Vectors, Matrices, and Quaternions?
    Presents an overview of the math-related functionality provided by the XNA Framework.
  • What Is a View Frustum?
    A view frustum is a 3D volume that defines how models are projected from camera space to projection space. Objects must be positioned within the 3D volume to be visible.
  • What Is a Viewport?
    A viewport is a 2D rectangle that defines the size of the rendering surface onto which a 3D scene is projected.