ATI Technologies RADEON 8500 MAC EDITION, User Manual

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CHARISMA
ENGINE
™
II
Supports transforms, clipping and lighting at 62.5
million triangles per second at peak processing
capability.
Color Depth Color depth is the number of color shades available on
your display. The color depth of your monitor usually
includes; 256 colors (8-bpp), Thousands of colors
(16-bpp), and Millions of colors (32-bpp), and is also
measured in bits per pixel (bpp). You can switch your
color depth using the ATI Popup Menu, Apple’s Control
Strip, or the Monitors control panel. Higher bit-depths
require more display buffer memory.
Note: The ATI 3D Accelerator only functions in
Thousands and Millions of colors modes.
Fog The blending of an object with a fixed color as objects
or pixels increase distance away from the viewer.
Frame Buffer Memory buffer used to store the image being displayed.
Gouraud Shading One of the more sophisticated shading methods used to
produce a smooth lighting effect across a 3D object. A
specific color is used at each vertice of a triangle or
polygon, and interpolated across the entire face.
HYPER Z
™
II A memory bandwidth saving technology that boosts
rendering performance.
MIP Map Multum In Parvum (Latin) means “many in one.” It is a
method of increasing quality of a texture map by storing
multiple resolutions of the same image and dynamically
switching between them depending on the size and
depth of the object being textured.
Offscreen Memory An area of memory used to preload and place images so
that they can be quickly drawn on the screen. Offscreen
memory refers to all the memory on your ATI
accelerator card that is not taken up by the front buffer,
which holds the display screen that you see.
Pixel, Pel Picture element. Smallest addressable area of the
computer screen. Pixels on computer displays are
square; pixels on NTSC televisions have a 4:3 aspect
ratio.
PIXEL
TAPESTRY
™
II
A 3D rendering engine which uses four rendering
pipelines to process 2 gigatexels per second for high fill
rates in 32-bit color at high resolutions.