The Pipeline Viewer is an information dense but simple window in RenderDoc. It shows all of the stateful settings of the graphics pipeline, including bound resources, rasterizer settings, etc.
Pipeline flowchart At the top of the Pipeline Viewer is the pipeline flowchart - this shows the high-level block level diagram of the graphics pipeline. Each block is a separate page which contains the relevant state and contents for that piece of the graphics pipeline, with specific details varying by API and the type of data to be displayed. The currently selected block is outlined with red, and the page in view reflects the contents of that section of the pipeline. Light grey parts of the pipeline are those which are currently active and participating in this drawcall. Dark grey parts of the pipeline are not present and can be considered pass-through/do-nothing. Pictured here, the high-level parts of the D3D11 Pipeline. In D3D11, the Stream-Out stage is available under the Geometry Shader block, with the buffers being used for stream-out shown.
Pipeline Section Display The pipeline state viewer always displays the state of the pipeline after the execution of the drawcall, as with the other viewers in RenderDoc. Any resources that are bound to the pipeline can be opened in more detailed viewers, such as vertex buffers, constant buffers and textures. More details of this process can be found in the page . The pipeline view attempts to only show what is relevant, and not all possible stateful data. To do this (when available) it uses shader reflection data to only display slots which are actually in use by the shaders, and omit any that are unused. This can be overridden with the Show Disabled Items button. Likewise it will omit any slots which are completely empty (and also unused), and this behaviour can be overridden with the Show Empty Items button. When showing disabled or empty entries, they will either be in italics or on a dark red background respectively.