3D Game Rendering 101

You're playing the latest Call of Mario: Deathduty Battleyardon your perfect gaming PC. You're looking at a beautiful 4K ultra widescreen monitor, admiring the glorious scenery and intricate detail. Ever wondered just how those graphics got there? Curious about what the game made your PC do to make them?

Welcome to our 101 in 3D game rendering: a beginner's guide to how one basic frame of gaming goodness is made.

Every year hundreds of new games are released around the globe – some are designed for mobile phones, some for consoles, some for PCs. The range of formats and genres covered is just as comprehensive, but there is one type that is possibly explored by game developers more than any other kind: 3D.

The first ever of its ilk is somewhat open to debate and a quick scan of the Guinness World Records database produces various answers. We could pick Knight Lore by Ultimate, launched in 1984, as a worthy starter but the images created in that game were strictly speaking 2D – no part of the information used is ever truly 3 dimensional.

So if we're going to understand how a 3D game of today makes its images, we need a different starting example: Winning Run by Namco, around 1988. It was perhaps the first of its kind to work out everything in 3 dimensions from the start, using techniques that aren't a million miles away from what's going on now. Of course, any game over 30 years old isn't going to truly be the same as, say, Codemasters F1 2018, but the basic scheme of doing it all isn't vastly different.

In this article, we'll walk through the process a 3D game takes to produce a basic image for a monitor or TV to display. We'll start with the end result and ask ourselves: "What am I looking at?"

From there, we'll analyze each step performed to get that picture we see. Along the way, we'll cover neat things like vertices and pixels, textures and passes, buffers and shading, as well as software and instructions. We'll also take a look at where the graphics card fits into all of this and why it's needed. With this 101, you'll look at your games and PC in a new light, and appreciate those graphics with a little more admiration.