summary of direct x at msdn

direct x uses the left-handed coordinate system. this means: the y axis points up, the x axis points right, and the z axis points away from you.

There are two shading modes in direct x: flat shading and gouraud shading. flat shading renders the poligons flat. if an object is rendered flat, you can clearly see the edges of a polygon. gouraud shading makes an object look smother. gouraud shading needs more computional power than flat shading.

The two faces of a triangle are called front face and back face. a face is a front face if vertex1, vertex2, and vertex3 are defined in clockwise order.

page flipping makes it possible for a direct x application to look smoother. it works like this: the user sees the front buffer while the application draws onto the back buffer. when the application is done drawing onto the backbuffer, it switches the front buffer with the backbuffer.

The process of rendering a set of vertices onto the screen is made using rendering pipelines. there are two different kinds of pipelines: fixed function vertex and pixel processing, programmable vertex and pixel processing.

• fixed function vertex and pixel processing
  consists of four steps: world transformation, view transformation, project transformation, clipping and viewport scaling.
  1. world transformation
     the coordinates of different objects (having their coordinates defined locally) are transformed into world space coordinates.
  2. view transformation
     the position of the camara is brought in.
  3. project transformation
     
  4. clipping and viewport scaling
     
• programmable vertex and pixel processing