How geometric primitives become fragments and pixels in a real-time rendering pipeline.
What is rasterization?
Rasterization converts geometric primitives such as triangles into fragments that can contribute to screen pixels.
The pipeline transforms vertices, determines covered samples, interpolates attributes and runs fragment shaders.
Why is it important?
Rasterization is efficient and predictable for real-time graphics. Specialized hardware can process many triangles and pixels in parallel.
It powers games, interfaces, visualization and much of interactive 3D.
What are its limits?
Rasterization does not directly follow every path of light. Reflections, shadows and indirect illumination need approximations such as shadow maps, probes or screen-space methods.
Aliasing can appear when continuous geometry is sampled onto a finite pixel grid.
Future
Rasterization will remain important alongside ray tracing. Temporal methods, variable-rate shading and machine-learning reconstruction will help it produce more detail at acceptable cost.
Ai disclosure: written with the help of AI (ChatGPT). You are encouraged to point out errors and omissions.
