Concepts, Concepts and More Concepts
Listed below are some "basic" concepts that will hopefully help you
understand the gibberish in the process section.
Bump Mapping:
Rendering technique that produces more realistic models
by implementing random or arrayed textural differences on the surface of
rendered objects. This creates a more believable illusion of the real world as
the surface of real objects are never even and uniform. Most
professional accelerators and some consumer ones (such as the Matrox Millennium
400) have hardware support for bump mapping.
Open GL:
OpenGL is the standard
environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics
applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry’s
most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming
interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of
computer platforms. OpenGL incorporates a broad set of rendering, texture
mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions and bridges
the gap between low level pixel drawing and high level programming.
Hardware Acceleration:
The use of Open GL, D3D or other graphic API
compliant hardware accelerators to speed up and improve the rendering process.
Powerful hardware acceleration for 3D rendering is widely available today in the
form of consumer oriented 3D cards such as the 3dfx Voodoo 3 and Nvidia Riva TNT
based cards.
Frame buffer Memory:
The frame buffer is what a video board uses to
store the images it renders, be they 2D desktops or 3D graphics in one of
today's many 3D accelerated titles. The amount of frame buffer memory a video
board has directly impacts which resolutions it can support, the more memory
you've got the higher resolutions your board will support and at higher bit
depths.
Bit Depths:
The number of bits that contain the color value of an
individual pixel. When VGA was common a computer image used 8 bits per pixel
(8bpp) to produce the final pixel on screen, 8bpp is just 256 colors. Today's
bit-depths is usually 16(high), 24(true) or 32(true) bit. 16bit is equal to 65
536 different possible colors being represented on screen at once. 24 or 32bit
means 16.7 Million different colors on screen at once.
Double/Triple Buffering:
In order to maintain fluid graphics a
technique called double buffering is deployed when rendering both 2D and 3D. The
video board renders into a back buffer and when the image has been finalized
it's flipped into the front buffer and the back buffer is cleared so that the
video board can start rendering the next frame. Triple buffering is very similar
to double buffering but it adds a third buffer, by doing so video boards that
support this feature can maintain a more fluid output and start taking new
commands from the application sooner.
Texture Memory:
Texture memory is where 3D accelerators store the
textures needed for rendering a scene. The amount of texture memory and
supported texture formats affect the quality of the textures that can be used.
The more texture memory, the more textures can be used in a scene.
Z-buffer:
3D accelerators use the Z-buffer memory to store depth values
for all 3D objects that are to be rendered on scene in order to efficiently
reduce artifacts by helping to determine which objects in a scene that will be
viewable in the finished image. Z-buffering requires additional memory.
Texture Filtering:
Filtering is the interpolation method to produce
smooth transitions between different pixels in the source texture, this is done
by sampling the several of the closest pixels of the source texture before
rendering each single telex on screen.
Mip-Mapping:
Mip-mapping is a technique where several versions of the
same texture are used to represent this texture on screen at different
distances, further away a smaller version of the texture is used and closer a
bigger one. Mip-mapping can be used regardless of filtering method. The
advantages of using Mip-mapping lies mainly in that it reduces memory bandwidth
requirements of rendering but it also offers better quality in the rendered
image.
Anti-Aliasing: A method of smoothing out jagged edges using
gradual fading colorations in order to improve the quality of a rendered
image.
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