G'day guys
I thought I would make a small glossary of 3D terms, many experienced users will already be familiar with these. This glossary is mainly aimed at informing noobs and the inexperienced with 3D tech terms, hope its found to be useful. Mods feel free to clean this up and make it a sticky, if you so wish.
Anisotropic Filtering
An advanced form of texture filtering that blends and smooths a texture out and gradually reduces quality as the texture recedes into the distance. Previously, multiple textures of differing qualities, called mip-maps, were used as the object receded. To prevent these mip-maps from being obvious they would be blended together using trilinear filtering, which itself is a derivative of bilinear filtering. Anisotropic filtering is significantly more advanced than trilinear filtering, but incurs a larger performance penalty.
16x Anisotropy on the 1st image, 8x Anisotropy and bilinear filtering on the 2nd image
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing removes the stepping, or "jaggies", that are a result of a diagonal line being displayed by by columns and rows of pixels. Anti-aliasing blends the colour of the pixels of the line with pixels around it.
Different levels of ant-aliasing provide different levels of image quality. It's also referred to as FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing) because it applies to everything on screen, and not just certain parts of the scene.
API (Application Program Interface)
A piece of software that sits between the hardware and application. Where previously each application had to have specific programming for each hardware function, which meant it had to accomodate multiple architectures, an API simplifies the process. Now programmers only have to write for the API, and that will then work on any hardware with drivers that are compatable with the API. DirectX and OpenGL are examples of API's.
Bump Mapping
A technique used to give a surface the illusion of having a 3D texture. In this way a flat 3D surface can look like it is a brick wall with subtle variations in the surface texture. It does this by manipulating the way light interacts with the surface, while the surface geometry remains unaltered. Bump mapping is not perfect, though, and the illusion is broken when the light is perpendicular to the surface, or the surface is viewed side-on.
Flat surface
With bump mapping
DirectX
Microsoft's API that covers everything from graphics, to sound, to input and networking and is primarily geared towards gaming. DirectX is currently at version 9.0c. It is vital that you have the latest version of DirectX in order to have support for the most up to date features.
Displacement Mapping
Displacement mapping is similar to bump mapping except it actually manipulates the geometry of the surface before the texture is applied. This means that if the surface is viewed side-on it doesn't appear flat, so it doesn't suffer the same problems as does bump mapping.
Download the demo here * Use the left mouse button to go forward, and the right to go backwards.
FP16/FP24/FP32
These refer to the the accuracy of the floating point calculations of a GPU measured in bits. Floating point numbers are either very large, very small, or fractions that cannot be represented by whole integers. The higher floating point level, the more accurately objects will be rendered. High floating point accuracy is required for some advanced 3D effects. Floating point calculations are more processor intensive than integer ones, and as such many GPU's have very powerful dedicated floating point processors.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
Name for any graphics processor that handles geometry calculations as well as texture rendering. The first consumer-level GPU was the Nvidia GeForce256.
HLSL (High Level Shading Language)
A new development in DirectX 9.0's Shader Model 2.0, the HLSL allows developers to write in a simplified high level programming language for advanced shading features instead of having to write in complex low-level code.
OpenGL
An industry standard API for 3D and graphics, mainly used in professional 3D and visualisation apps, though some games support OpenGL. Its a very advanced language and relatively easy to program for, though its more difficult to to write good OpenGL drivers for hardware.
Pipelines
Most GPU's can render more than one pixel at a time by having multiple rendering pipelines. This means the rendering job is broken up into seperate tasks and each individual pipeline works on one part at a time. Pipelining is used for general purpose CPU's as well, but is less effective as the results of one pipeline often affect the result of another, while in graphics there is just a vast number of pixels that may only need a few texture effects applied without necessarily interacting with each other.
Pixel Shaders
Pixel shaders handle all texturing and texture effects in a rendering cycle. Effects include bump mapping, texture filtering and blending.
Shader Model 3.0
The latest set of shader features to be supported by DirectX 9.0c. These include advanced shading effects, but they are supported by very few games at the moment. Nvidia's latest generation of graphics hardware supports Shader Model 3.0, while ATI's does not.
Transform & Lighting (T&L)
Transform and lighting are processes that are applied to the geometry of a 3D scene. Transforming converts the location of vertices from a 3D space to the 2D representation on a monitor. Lighting simulates the effects of light sources in a 3D scene. These were traditionally handled by the CPU, but most modern GPU's take care of both of these, with vertex and pixel shaders making traditional T&L engines redundant.
Vertex (PL vertices)
A vertex is the basic element of geometry, and is the point at which two or more edges meet. By manipulating vertices you can alter the shapes of objects, animate them, or distort them. Many 3D calculations are performed on vertices, such as lighting calculations, before textures are applied.
Cheers-PV
I thought I would make a small glossary of 3D terms, many experienced users will already be familiar with these. This glossary is mainly aimed at informing noobs and the inexperienced with 3D tech terms, hope its found to be useful. Mods feel free to clean this up and make it a sticky, if you so wish.
Anisotropic Filtering
An advanced form of texture filtering that blends and smooths a texture out and gradually reduces quality as the texture recedes into the distance. Previously, multiple textures of differing qualities, called mip-maps, were used as the object receded. To prevent these mip-maps from being obvious they would be blended together using trilinear filtering, which itself is a derivative of bilinear filtering. Anisotropic filtering is significantly more advanced than trilinear filtering, but incurs a larger performance penalty.
16x Anisotropy on the 1st image, 8x Anisotropy and bilinear filtering on the 2nd image
Anti-aliasing
Anti-aliasing removes the stepping, or "jaggies", that are a result of a diagonal line being displayed by by columns and rows of pixels. Anti-aliasing blends the colour of the pixels of the line with pixels around it.
Different levels of ant-aliasing provide different levels of image quality. It's also referred to as FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing) because it applies to everything on screen, and not just certain parts of the scene.
API (Application Program Interface)
A piece of software that sits between the hardware and application. Where previously each application had to have specific programming for each hardware function, which meant it had to accomodate multiple architectures, an API simplifies the process. Now programmers only have to write for the API, and that will then work on any hardware with drivers that are compatable with the API. DirectX and OpenGL are examples of API's.
Bump Mapping
A technique used to give a surface the illusion of having a 3D texture. In this way a flat 3D surface can look like it is a brick wall with subtle variations in the surface texture. It does this by manipulating the way light interacts with the surface, while the surface geometry remains unaltered. Bump mapping is not perfect, though, and the illusion is broken when the light is perpendicular to the surface, or the surface is viewed side-on.
Flat surface
With bump mapping
DirectX
Microsoft's API that covers everything from graphics, to sound, to input and networking and is primarily geared towards gaming. DirectX is currently at version 9.0c. It is vital that you have the latest version of DirectX in order to have support for the most up to date features.
Displacement Mapping
Displacement mapping is similar to bump mapping except it actually manipulates the geometry of the surface before the texture is applied. This means that if the surface is viewed side-on it doesn't appear flat, so it doesn't suffer the same problems as does bump mapping.
Download the demo here * Use the left mouse button to go forward, and the right to go backwards.
FP16/FP24/FP32
These refer to the the accuracy of the floating point calculations of a GPU measured in bits. Floating point numbers are either very large, very small, or fractions that cannot be represented by whole integers. The higher floating point level, the more accurately objects will be rendered. High floating point accuracy is required for some advanced 3D effects. Floating point calculations are more processor intensive than integer ones, and as such many GPU's have very powerful dedicated floating point processors.
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
Name for any graphics processor that handles geometry calculations as well as texture rendering. The first consumer-level GPU was the Nvidia GeForce256.
HLSL (High Level Shading Language)
A new development in DirectX 9.0's Shader Model 2.0, the HLSL allows developers to write in a simplified high level programming language for advanced shading features instead of having to write in complex low-level code.
OpenGL
An industry standard API for 3D and graphics, mainly used in professional 3D and visualisation apps, though some games support OpenGL. Its a very advanced language and relatively easy to program for, though its more difficult to to write good OpenGL drivers for hardware.
Pipelines
Most GPU's can render more than one pixel at a time by having multiple rendering pipelines. This means the rendering job is broken up into seperate tasks and each individual pipeline works on one part at a time. Pipelining is used for general purpose CPU's as well, but is less effective as the results of one pipeline often affect the result of another, while in graphics there is just a vast number of pixels that may only need a few texture effects applied without necessarily interacting with each other.
Pixel Shaders
Pixel shaders handle all texturing and texture effects in a rendering cycle. Effects include bump mapping, texture filtering and blending.
Shader Model 3.0
The latest set of shader features to be supported by DirectX 9.0c. These include advanced shading effects, but they are supported by very few games at the moment. Nvidia's latest generation of graphics hardware supports Shader Model 3.0, while ATI's does not.
Transform & Lighting (T&L)
Transform and lighting are processes that are applied to the geometry of a 3D scene. Transforming converts the location of vertices from a 3D space to the 2D representation on a monitor. Lighting simulates the effects of light sources in a 3D scene. These were traditionally handled by the CPU, but most modern GPU's take care of both of these, with vertex and pixel shaders making traditional T&L engines redundant.
Vertex (PL vertices)
A vertex is the basic element of geometry, and is the point at which two or more edges meet. By manipulating vertices you can alter the shapes of objects, animate them, or distort them. Many 3D calculations are performed on vertices, such as lighting calculations, before textures are applied.
Cheers-PV
