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render target

The image a GPU draws its output into — which need not be the screen itself.

A render target is the destination image that a pipeline writes pixels to. It's often the screen, but can also be an off-screen texture used later, and 'multiple render targets' means a single shader pass writes several outputs at once (say color plus surface normals). These intermediate images are the raw material for effects like post-processing.

See also

  • render pass / subpassVulkan's way of formally declaring a chunk of rendering and its internal steps up front, so the GPU can optimize it.
  • resolveCollapsing a multi-sample (anti-aliased) image down to one clean sample per pixel.
  • post-processingVisual effects applied to the whole finished image after the 3D scene has already been drawn.
  • PPMA dead-simple uncompressed image file format that stores raw pixel color values in plain form.

Referenced by

post-processing · PPM · render pass / subpass · resolve · retained mode