Graphics

This section explains how to use Game Studio and the Xenko API for graphics and rendering.

Shaders

Shaders are authored in the Xenko's shading language, an extension of HLSL. They provide true composition of modular shaders through the use of inheritance, shader mixins, and automatic weaving of shader in-out attributes.

Effects

Effects in Xenko use C#-like syntax to combine shaders. They provide conditional composition of shaders to generate effect permutations.

Target everything

Xenko shaders are converted automatically to the target graphics platform, either plain HLSL for Direct3D, GLSL for OpenGL, or SPIR-V for Vulkan platforms.

Advanced graphics

The graphics module provides a set of methods to display the game. Although Xenko is available on multiple platforms, the whole system behaves like Direct3D 11 from the user perspective. You need a basic knowledge of the rendering pipeline to use it.

In this section

• Cameras
• Materials
• Textures
• Lights and shadows
• Post effects
• Graphics compositor
• Effects and shaders
• Low-level API
• Rendering pipeline
• Sprite fonts