ATI 9550 User Guide - Page 24

Pixel, Pel PIXEL TAPESTRY™ II Refresh Rate SMARTSHADER™ II SMOOTHVISION™ II Specular Highlight Texture Mapping Trilinear Filtering VIDEO IMMERSION™ II z-buffer Picture element. Smallest addressable area of the computer screen. Pixels on computer displays are square; pixels on NTSC televisions have a 4:3 aspect ratio. A 3D rendering engine which uses four rendering pipelines to process 2 gigatexels per second for high fill rates in 32-bit color at high resolutions. Also referred to as "vertical refresh rate". The rate at which a monitor or television can redraw the screen from top to bottom. NTSC television systems have a refresh rate of approximately 60 Hz (but only draw onehalf of the video frame in one pass); computer displays typically have refresh rates of 75 Hz or more. At a refresh rate of 70 Hz and lower, screen flicker is often noticeable. An advanced programmable pixel and vertex shader technology which delivers complex and realistic textures and lighting without slowing performance. Full Screen Anti-Aliasing technology designed to minimize jagged edges resulting in smooth images. The bright, usually small, intense light reflected from a 3-D surface with a high refraction value. Mapping, or placing, an image onto an object. Images of realistic surfaces are placed on 3D models to create a richer and more complex visual effect. Sampling method used to produce the most realistic looking 3D objects. Trilinear filtering averages one of the bilinear filter MIP Map levels along with the standard MIP Map samples. Enables integration of DVD, video playback, and advanced de-interlacing algorithms. A z-buffer is an area of off-screen memory used to hold "depth" information. For each dot, or pixel, in the display buffer, there is a corresponding dot in the z-buffer which holds the depth (z) value for the display pixel. The depth data helps the ATI accelerator card decide what 3D objects are in front of other 3D objects. The larger the 3D window, the larger the z-buffer is in memory. 21