For an image to appear on the screen, the computer must draw the images on the screen to display it. The sequence of steps to create a 2D representation of a scene by using both 2D and 3D data information is known as the graphics or rendering pipeline. Computer hardware such as central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) are used to calculate and manipulate the input data needed for drawing the 3D scene.

As games are interactive and rely heavily on real-time rendering, the amount of data necessary for rendering moving scenes is huge. Coordinate position, color, and all display information needs to be calculated for each vertex of the triangle polygon and at the same time, taking into account the effect of overlapping polygons before they can be displayed on screen correctly. Hence, it is very crucial to optimize both the CPU and GPU capabilities to process this data and deliver them timely on the screen. Continuous improvement in this area has been made over the years to allow better quality images to be rendered at higher frame rates for a better visual effect. At this point, games should run at a minimum frame rate of 30fps in order for players to have a reasonable gaming experience.

The rendering pipeline today uses a series of programmable shaders to manipulate information about an image before displaying the image on the screen. We'll cover shaders and Direct3D 11 graphics pipeline in more detail in the upcoming section.