3DLABS Oxygen GMX - Manual (Page 25)

Terms and Definitions
Chapter 4 - Glossary 17
Depth Cueing
A technique used to give the illusion of depth. With depth cueing, the part of an
object that is farther away is displayed with a lower intensity to give the effect of
depth.
Dithering
The process of converting an image with a certain bit depth to one with a lower bit
depth. Dithering enables the application to convert an image’s colors that it cannot
display into two or more colors that closely resemble the original. Dithering works
because the mind is tricked by the pattern of colors into thinking it’s a different
color.
Double Buffering
With double-buffering, images are rendered in the back buffer and then displayed
on the screen once the drawing is completed. This results in the smooth, flicker-
free rotation and animation of 3D models and scenes.
Driver
A driver is a special interface program that is developed to perform the
communication between the application program, the device (i.e., graphics
peripheral) and the operating system.
EVGA
Extended Video Graphics Array. EVGA runs at 1024 x 768.
Flat Shading
The simplest method of shading. Each triangle is assigned one single color,
resulting in a faceted appearance of the surface.
Floating Point
The portion of the mathematics execution unit of a processor generally associated
with multiply and divide operations.
Frame Buffer
A 24-bit, true-color frame buffer provides 8 bit for each red, green and blue
primary display color. This results in 16.8 million color combinations. A second,
or double, buffer enables system to calculate pixels one step ahead of the screen
display for smooth, distortion free images.
Geometry
The intermediate stage of the 3D pipeline, geometry determines the location of the
object and the frame of reference of the viewer in relation to the object.