Computer graphicsComputer graphics deals with generating s and art with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing.
Multisample anti-aliasingMultisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is a type of spatial anti-aliasing, a technique used in computer graphics to remove jaggies. The term generally refers to a special case of supersampling. Initial implementations of full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) worked conceptually by simply rendering a scene at a higher resolution, and then downsampling to a lower-resolution output. Most modern GPUs are capable of this form of anti-aliasing, but it greatly taxes resources such as texture, bandwidth, and fillrate.
Jaggies"Jaggies" is the informal name for artifacts in s, most frequently from aliasing, which in turn is often caused by non-linear mixing effects producing high-frequency components, or missing or poor anti-aliasing filtering prior to sampling. Jaggies are stair-like lines that appear where there should be "smooth" straight lines or curves. For example, when a nominally straight, un-aliased line steps across one pixel either horizontally or vertically, a "dogleg" occurs halfway through the line, where it crosses the threshold from one pixel to the other.
Spatial anti-aliasingIn digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts (aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics, digital audio, and many other applications. Anti-aliasing means removing signal components that have a higher frequency than is able to be properly resolved by the recording (or sampling) device. This removal is done before (re)sampling at a lower resolution.
Graphics processing unitA graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed to accelerate computer graphics and (either on a video card or embedded on the motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles). After their initial design, GPUs were found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining.
Rendering (computer graphics)Rendering or image synthesis is the process of generating a photorealistic or non-photorealistic image from a 2D or 3D model by means of a computer program. The resulting image is referred to as the render. Multiple models can be defined in a scene file containing objects in a strictly defined language or data structure. The scene file contains geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information describing the virtual scene. The data contained in the scene file is then passed to a rendering program to be processed and output to a or raster graphics image file.