Graphics Glossary

Browse 26 graphics terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

26 Graphics Terms

Blender
An open-source 3D creation suite used for modeling, animation, rendering, and related digital-content work.
Compute Shader
A Compute Shader is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Draw
To render visual output to a screen, canvas, or buffer. In graphics programming, a draw call is an instruction from the CPU to the GPU to render a set of...
Fragment Shader
A Fragment Shader is a development concept used to shape how software is built, executed, or maintained in real systems. Developers rely on it to make code...
Frame Rate
The frequency at which consecutive images (frames) are rendered or displayed, measured in frames per second (FPS). 60 FPS is the standard target for smooth...
GIMP
An open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation, compositing, and visual asset work.
Mesa
An open-source implementation of graphics APIs such as OpenGL and Vulkan used widely in Linux and related systems. In graphics and Linux culture, Mesa is...
OpenGL
A long-standing graphics API standard used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics across many platforms. In graphics culture, OpenGL is both foundational history and...
Pixel Buffer
A contiguous block of memory that stores raw pixel data (color values for each pixel in a grid) representing a frame or texture. In OpenGL it's called a Pixel...
Rasterization
The process of converting vector graphics or 3D geometry (triangles, primitives) into a grid of pixels for display on a screen. The GPU's rasterization stage...
Render
To compute and produce a visual output — whether generating HTML/DOM elements from component state in a web framework, rasterizing 3D geometry into pixels in a...
Renderer
A software component responsible for converting an abstract representation (scene graph, virtual DOM, markup template) into visual output on a specific target...
Rendering
The process of generating a visual output — such as pixels on screen, HTML markup, or a 3D scene — from underlying data, templates, or scene descriptions.
Render Loop
A continuous loop — typically running at 30, 60, or higher frames per second — that repeatedly clears the frame buffer, processes input, updates game/scene...
Render Pipeline
The sequence of stages that transforms 3D scene data into a 2D image on screen — vertex processing, primitive assembly, rasterization, fragment shading, and...
Scene
A hierarchical data structure representing the objects, lights, cameras, and spatial relationships in a virtual 3D environment, typically organized as a scene...
Screen Buffer
A region of memory that holds the character or pixel data representing what is currently displayed (or about to be displayed) on a screen, commonly used in...
Shader
A small program that runs on the GPU to control how vertices, pixels, or compute workloads are processed, written in languages like GLSL, HLSL, or WGSL.
Shapes
Geometric primitives — rectangles, circles, paths, polygons — used in 2D graphics APIs, UI frameworks, and vector drawing to compose visual elements...
Sprite
A two-dimensional bitmap image or animation integrated into a larger scene, historically used in video games for characters and objects, and in web development...
SVG
Scalable Vector Graphics — an XML-based image format that describes shapes, paths, and text as mathematical instructions rather than pixel grids, allowing...
Texture
A bitmap image mapped onto the surface of a 3D model or 2D sprite to give it visual detail — stored in GPU memory and sampled by shaders during rendering using...
Tween
Short for 'in-between' — the process of generating intermediate frames between two keyframes to create smooth animation. In game dev and UI, tweening...
Vertex
A point in space (2D or 3D) that defines the corner of a geometric primitive such as a triangle or polygon. In graphics programming, a vertex carries not just...
Vertex Shader
A GPU program that runs once per vertex in the graphics pipeline, transforming vertex positions from model space through view and projection matrices into clip...
WebGPU
A modern browser API for GPU-accelerated graphics and general-purpose GPU computation, succeeding WebGL. Provides lower-level GPU access similar to...

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