ELSA Synergy 2000, Manual

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Glossary
43
| ELSA Synergy 2000 |
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 sce-
nario on the monitor. Included in this are
➟
Geometrical transformation and
➟
Re-
fresh rate .
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
information per pixel for generating
transparent material.
쎲
Anisotropic filtering – Method de-
signed to reduce texture aliasing effects
on surfaces at an angle to the viewer. Un-
like other methods (such as
➟
Bilinear fil-
tering ,
➟
Trilinear filtering ) 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
➟
Aliasing effects.
쎲
API – Application Programming Interface.
Software interfaces that provide applica-
tions with complete packages of func-
tions. The most important 3D APIs are
➟
Direct3D and
➟
OpenGL
쎲
Back buffer – A portion of the graphics
memory that is used to construct the im-
age that is to appear on the monitor next.
The back buffer is also used to calculate
transparency effects.
쎲
Back-face culling – Leaving out invisi-
ble areas.
쎲
Bilinear filtering – In this case, a
weighted average is calculated from four
neighboring
➟
Pixels or
➟
Texels (2x2
matrix).
쎲
BIOS – Abbreviation for basic input/out-
put system. A code stored in the comput-
er's memory (ROM), which carries out the
self test and various other functions when
the system is started.
쎲
Blitting – Traditional method for
➟
Buf-
fer swapping : the contents of the
➟
Bump
mapping is copied to the
➟
Front buffer ;
slower than
➟
Page flipping .