Help with DepthStencilState and RasterizerState

[EuReinoso]

Hello, I'm new to monogame v3.8.1

I don't understand how the "DepthStencilState" and "RasterizerState" works in SpriteBatch.Begin()

I would like visual examples to better understand how they can affect my objects on the screen.

I tried searching the documentation at https://monogame.net/documentation/ but apparently the site is down

[Rafloka]

DepthStencilState:

First, what is the depth buffer? When you render e.g. a triangle, it's vertices are transformed in the vertex shader, then rasterized to pixels in the pixel/fragment shader. Usually, between vertex and pixel/fragment shader, the depth buffer is used to decide if a pixel/fragment is already overlapped by another pixel (in depth) and thus may not be processed by the pixel/fragment shader. This way, 3D objects also are depth sorted correctly (on a per pixel/fragment basis, not on a per object basis).

DepthStencilState.None means: When rendering, no information is written to or read from the depth buffer. Thus whatever is rendered overlaps everything that is already there, e.g. good for UI.

DepthStencilState.Default means: It is read from and written to the depth buffer. This is your typical 3D scenario. Fragments/pixels are depth sorted correctly (if opaque) and you can render 'in between' things.

DepthStencilState.DepthRead means: It is only read from the depth buffer, meaning when rendering, the current state of depth information in the buffer is taken into account but not changed by the newly rendered thing. Is e.g. used when drawing all transparent (additive blending) particles into a 3D world after all opaque objects have been rendered.

In the context of 2D, you can avoid needing a depth buffer by controlling the drawing order of things exactly as you wish as 2D is often more akin to layers of paper on top of each other.

RasterizerState:

To improve rendering speed, one technique is to only draw (or rasterize) triangles which are considered pointing 'towards' the camera. For that, the concept of winding order of the triangle's vertices is used, clockwise or counter-clockwise. You can now decide, if one or the other is considered pointing towards the camera or if it is ignored entirely, hence

RasterizerState.CullClockwise
RasterizerState.CullCounterClockwise
RasterizerState.CullNone

In the context of 2D, this is most of the time RasterizerState.CullNone.

[EuReinoso]

This is way more than I was expecting, thank you very much! 😄