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Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering, W-buffering, stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, texture blending, clipping, culling, atmospheric effects, perspective-correct texture mapping, programmable HLSL shaders and effects. Integration with other DirectX technologies enables Direct3D to deliver such features as video mapping, hardware 3D rendering in 2D overlay planes, and even sprites, providing the use of 2D and 3D graphics in interactive media ties.
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is a legacy component of Microsoft Windows responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. It was superseded by DirectDraw API and later Direct2D API. Windows apps use Windows API to interact with GDI, for such tasks as drawing lines and curves, rendering fonts, and handling palettes. The Windows USER subsystem uses GDI to render such UI elements as window frames and menus. Other systems have components that are similar to GDI; for example: Mac OS has QuickDraw, and Linux and Unix have X Window System core protocol.
X3D is a set of royalty-free ISO/IEC standards for declaratively representing 3D computer graphics. X3D includes multiple graphics file formats, programming-language API definitions, and run-time specifications for both delivery and integration of interactive network-capable 3D data. X3D version 4.0 has been approved by Web3D Consortium, and is under final review by ISO/IEC as a revised International Standard (IS).
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit initially designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on 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.
X.Org Server is the free and open-source implementation of the X Window System (X11) display server stewarded by the X.Org Foundation.
GLX is an extension to the X Window System core protocol providing an interface between OpenGL and the X Window System as well as extensions to OpenGL itself. It enables programs wishing to use OpenGL to do so within a window provided by the X Window System. GLX distinguishes two "states": indirect state and direct state.
In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set, typically a 3D scalar field.
The X video extension, often abbreviated as XVideo or Xv, is a video output mechanism for the X Window System. The protocol was designed by David Carver; the specification for version 2 of the protocol was written in July 1991. It is mainly used today to resize video content in the video controller hardware in order to enlarge a given video or to watch it in full screen mode. Without XVideo, X would have to do this scaling on the main CPU. That requires a considerable amount of processing power, which could slow down or degrade the video stream; video controllers are specifically designed for this kind of computation, so can do it much more cheaply. Similarly, the X video extension can have the video controller perform color space conversions, and change the contrast, brightness, and hue of a displayed video stream.
PHIGS is an application programming interface (API) standard for rendering 3D computer graphics, considered to be the 3D graphics standard for the 1980s through the early 1990s. Subsequently, a combination of features and power led to the rise of OpenGL, which became the most popular professional 3D API of the mid to late 1990s.
Parallel rendering is the application of parallel programming to the computational domain of computer graphics. Rendering graphics can require massive computational resources for complex scenes that arise in scientific visualization, medical visualization, CAD applications, and virtual reality. Recent research has also suggested that parallel rendering can be applied to mobile gaming to decrease power consumption and increase graphical fidelity. Rendering is an embarrassingly parallel workload in multiple domains and thus has been the subject of much research.
The Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) is the framework comprising the modern Linux graphics stack which allows unprivileged user-space programs to issue commands to graphics hardware without conflicting with other programs. The main use of DRI is to provide hardware acceleration for the Mesa implementation of OpenGL. DRI has also been adapted to provide OpenGL acceleration on a framebuffer console without a display server running.
Real-time computer graphics or real-time rendering is the sub-field of computer graphics focused on producing and analyzing images in real time. The term can refer to anything from rendering an application's graphical user interface (GUI) to real-time image analysis, but is most often used in reference to interactive 3D computer graphics, typically using a graphics processing unit (GPU). One example of this concept is a video game that rapidly renders changing 3D environments to produce an illusion of motion.
Xgl is an obsolete display server implementation supporting the X Window System protocol designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz or Beryl. The project was started by David Reveman of Novell and first released on January 2, 2006. It was removed from the X.org server in favor of AIGLX on June 12, 2008.
Desktop Window Manager is the compositing window manager in Microsoft Windows since Windows Vista that enables the use of hardware acceleration to render the graphical user interface of Windows.
Core OpenGL, or CGL, is Apple Inc.'s Macintosh Quartz windowing system interface to the OS X implementation of the OpenGL specification. CGL is analogous to GLX, which is the X11 interface to OpenGL, as well as WGL, which is the Microsoft Windows interface to OpenGL.
VirtualGL (VGL) is an open-source software package that redirects the 3D rendering commands from Unix and Linux OpenGL applications to 3D accelerator hardware in a dedicated server and sends the rendered output to a (thin) client located elsewhere on the network. On the server side, VirtualGL consists of a library that handles the redirection and a wrapper program that instructs applications to use this library. Clients can connect to the server either using a remote X11 connection or using an X11 proxy such as a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) server. In case of an X11 connection some client-side VirtualGL software is also needed to receive the rendered graphics output separately from the X11 stream. In case of a VNC connection no specific client-side software is needed other than the VNC client itself.
A video wall is a special multi-monitor setup that consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include LCD panels, Direct View LED arrays, blended projection screens, Laser Phosphor Displays, and rear projection cubes. Jumbotron technology was also previously used. Diamond Vision was historically similar to Jumbotron in that they both used cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology, but with slight differences between the two. Early Diamond vision displays used separate flood gun CRTs, one per subpixel. Later Diamond vision displays and all Jumbotrons used field-replaceable modules containing several flood gun CRTs each, one per subpixel, that had common connections shared across all CRTs in a module; the module was connected through a single weather-sealed connector.
Nvidia Optimus is a computer GPU switching technology created by Nvidia which, depending on the resource load generated by client software applications, will seamlessly switch between two graphics adapters within a computer system in order to provide either maximum performance or minimum power draw from the system's graphics rendering hardware.
ANGLE is an open source, cross-platform graphics engine abstraction layer developed by Google. ANGLE translates OpenGL ES 2/3 calls to DirectX 9, 11, OpenGL or Vulkan API calls. It is a portable version of OpenGL but with limitations of OpenGL ES standard.
Stage3D is an Adobe Flash Player API for rendering interactive 3D graphics with GPU-acceleration, within Flash games and applications. Flash Player or AIR applications written in ActionScript 3 may use Stage3D to render 3D graphics, and such applications run natively on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Apple iOS and Google Android. Stage3D is similar in purpose and design to WebGL.
References
- ↑ Humphreys, Greg; Houston, Mike; Ng, Ren; Frank, Randall; Ahern, Sean; Kirchner, Peter; Klosowski, James (July 2002). "Chromium: A Stream-Processing Framework for Interactive Rendering on Clusters" (PDF). Written at San Diego. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. SIGGRAPH '02. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 693–702. doi:10.1145/566570.566639. ISBN 1581135211 . Retrieved 12 September 2020.
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