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Glossary
37
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ELSA GLADIAC 5II
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EN
7
Glossary
쎲
3D –
Three-dimensional.
쎲
3D clipping –
A process within geomet-
ric transformation in which invisible areas
or portions of a 3D object are removed.
쎲
3DNow! –
Extended command set used
by AMD in the K6-2, K6-3 and K7 proces-
sors. 21 additional commands are intend-
ed above all to accelerate the floating-
point operations that are especially impor-
tant for 3D games.
쎲
3D pipeline –
The sum of all steps re-
quired in displaying an imaginary 3D
scenario on the monitor. Included in this
are
쎲
AGP bus –
Abbreviation for Accelerated
Graphics Port—a relatively new interface
standard within the PC platform. Graphics
boards take advantage of its high transfer
rates for the display of 3D and full-motion
video sequences.
쎲
Aliasing –
The well-known staircase ef-
fect. There is often a jagged transition be-
tween adjacent pixels when displaying
slanted or curved lines. The rough transi-
tions can be smoothed using anti-aliasing.
쎲
Alpha blending –
Supplementary infor-
mation per pixel for generating transpar-
ent material.
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Anisotropic filtering –
Method de-
signed to reduce texture aliasing effects
on surfaces at an angle to the viewer. Un-
like other methods (such as
) anisotropic
filtering takes into account that such sur-
faces require a greater number of texture
pixels for a clean display than surfaces
that are perpendicular to the viewer. This
especially enhances the legibility of text
on angled planes (“Star Wars text”).
쎲
Anti-aliasing –
Methods for the reduc-
tion of
effects.
쎲
API –
Application Programming Interface.
Software interfaces that provide applica-
tions with complete packages of func-
tions. The most important 3D APIs are
쎲
Back buffer –
A portion of the graphics
memory that is used to construct the
image that is to appear on the monitor
next. The back buffer is also used to calcu-
late transparency effects.
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Back-face culling –
Leaving out invisi-
ble areas.
쎲
Bilinear filtering –
In this case, a
weighted average is calculated from four
neighboring
or
(2x2
matrix).
쎲
BIOS –
Abbreviation for basic input/
output system. A code stored in the com-
puter's memory (ROM), which carries out
the self test and various other functions
when the system is started.
쎲
Blitting –
traditional method for
: the contents of the
is copied to the
;
slower than
