Post
The foundational technique that converts 3D geometry into 2D pixels on your screen, powering virtually every game ever made.
Rasterization is the workhorse of real-time graphics. It takes 3D triangles defined by vertices in world space, projects them onto a 2D screen, and determines which pixels each triangle covers. For each covered pixel, it calculates color based on textures, lighting, and shading models. The entire process happens millions of times per frame on your GPU's massively parallel architecture. Unlike ray tracing, which traces light paths through a scene, rasterization works triangle by triangle, processing geometry in the order it is submitted. This approach is fast but requires tricks and approximations for effects like reflections and global illumination that ray tracing handles naturally.
Example
Every game you have ever played on a console uses rasterization as its primary rendering method. Even titles with ray tracing like Cyberpunk 2077 still rasterize the base image and use ray tracing selectively for specific effects. Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal are showcases of how far rasterization can be pushed, delivering stunning visuals at incredibly high frame rates through aggressive optimization of the rasterization pipeline using id Tech's Vulkan renderer.
Why it matters
Rasterization has been the dominant rendering technique for over 30 years because nothing else can match its speed-to-quality ratio. Understanding it explains why certain visual artifacts exist, why draw order matters, and why ray tracing is such a big deal: it solves the problems that rasterization has been working around with clever hacks for decades.
Related concepts