- AGP
- Accelerated Graphics Port; a high-performance bus designed specifically
for graphical devices.
- alpha-blending
- A technique of portraying transparency when drawing
an object.
It combines the color of an object to be drawn (the source)
and the color of whatever the object is to be drawn on top of (the
destination).
The higher the blending factor of the source object, the more opaque the
object looks.
Mathematically, a blending factor is a real number between 0 and 1,
inclusive.
These are normally mapped to the range 0-0xFF for storage purposes in a 2D library.
A 32-bit color is made up of four 8-bit channels: alpha,
red, green, and blue.
These channels are represented as (A, R, G, B).
When referring to the source, the channels are denoted as As, Rs, Gs, and Bs;
for the destination, they're Ad, Rd, Gd, and Bd.
- BIOS
- Basic Input/Output System; standard ROM services that are available on
x86 platforms.
- blitting
- BLock Image Transfer; copying an image from one place on the screen to
another.
- chroma keying
- A method of masking out pixel data during a rendering operation (blits,
image rendering, etc.) based on a key color value.
- CRTC
- Cathode-Ray Tube Controller.
- DPMS
- Display Power Management System; a system that reduces the amount of
energy consumed by a monitor when it's idle.
- falling back on software
- Using software to perform operations that the graphics hardware doesn't
support.
- FFB
- Flat Frame Buffer
- PCI
- Peripheral Components Interface; a general-purpose system bus that's
found in most modern PCs.
- raster operations (ROP)
- A per-pixel operation to be performed when rendering an object.
A raster operation may involve up to three input parameters (source,
pattern, and destination) that are combined in accordance with the
raster operation that's currently in effect.
The resulting pixel value is written to the destination.
- ROP3
- A set of 256 raster operations, as defined by Microsoft.
- stride
- The number of bytes from the beginning of one scanline to the
beginning of the next in a 2-dimensional image.
- surface
- A two-dimensional area.
- ternary raster operation
- A raster operation involving 3 input parameters.
- VESA
- Video Electronics Standards Association.