Explain the vertices pipeline.

I was wondering, can anyone explain to me, precisely:

what happens between the

vertices array, and, an image appearing on the iPad3 screen.

I understand everything at every conceptual level (from physics to APIs!) about the “vertices array.”

However, I’m just a blur from there to the iPad3 screen.

So what’s the next step after the vertices array? How does it get in to … nVidia? openGL?

Thanks!

consider this page:

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/iphone-Hardware.html

and the technical docs that are linked from it. But in general, the mesh data is sent to the GPU along with the shaders that it needs. The GPU caches this data, and all the other mesh and shader data. Once it has all the triangles and vertices, it’ll then sort these into tiles, and then sort the triangles back to front in each tile. These sorted triangles are then clipped against each other, so only visible triangles and triangle fragments exist. These are then rendered and textured into the tile.