The process of producing images with textures, reflections and, most importantly, apparent depth throws up more terms and jargon than most others. We explain the most common, including those elements tested by 3D WinBench 99. Add pixel blending A method of blending the current active pixel with the one in the frame buffer, producing an output pixel that effectively mixes the values of the two. A hardware technique that supports true transparency and translucency by blending the values of a source and a destination pixel to allow for more sophisticated effects. For example, in a car scene, the blue tint on a windscreen would modulate the colours of the sky and landscape beyond.
Alpha vertices The ability to supply an alpha channel in the colour at each vertex.
Anti-aliasing Hides the jagged effect of image diagonals by modulating the intensity on either side of the boundaries, creating localised blurring along these edges. This reduces the appearance of 'stepping'. Bilinear and trilinear filtering Applied to the process of mipmapping, these algorithms take values from adjacent texels and combine them, smoothing the transition from one mipmap level to the next. This adds an appearance of depth to a 2D texture map. Clamp texture addressing The ability to extend a texture map's border values from the perimeter of the texture to the extent of the surface polygon upon which it sits.