The Voodoo Graphics hardware has a very flexible lighting and texture mapping pipeline to support all of the features described earlier.

Glide abstracts it into three distinct units:

the texture combine unit,

the color and alpha combine unit, and

the special effects unit

The basic architecture is illustrated in .

Figure 1.2 The pixel pipeline.

The rendering engine is structured as a pipeline through which each pixel drawn to the screen must pass. The individual stages of the pixel pipeline modify or invalidate individual pixels based on mode settings.

The pixel source is one of four things:

a texture value,

an iterated RGBA value,

a constant RGBA value,

or data for a frame buffer write

Pixels that pass the chroma-key test go to the color combine unit where a user-specified lighting function is applied. The special effects unit further modifies the pixel with alpha and depth testing, fog, and alpha blending operations. The final 24-bit color value is then dithered to 16 bits and written to the frame buffer.