ABSTRACT
As we saw in Chapter 2, the process of rendering an image is based on a pipelined architecture with three conceptual stages: application, geometry, and rasterizer. At any given moment, one of these stages, or the communication path between them, will always be the bottleneck-the slowest stage in the pipeline. This implies that the bottleneck stage sets the limit for the throughput, i.e., the total rendering performance, and so is a prime candidate for optimization.
