Rasterization
Converting geometry into pixels — the dominant real-time rendering approach.
Rasterization determines which pixels a piece of geometry covers and shades them. It is the basis of essentially all real-time rendering: transform vertices into screen space, find covered pixels, run a Shader for each, and resolve visibility with a depth buffer. It is fast because it is embarrassingly parallel and because most geometry can be discarded early.
Its limitation is that a rasterizer sees one triangle at a time, so effects requiring knowledge of the whole scene — shadows, reflections, indirect light — must be approximated with extra passes.
Shadow mapping is the standard approximation for shadows: render the scene from the light's point of view, storing depth; then, when shading, transform each point into that space and compare. If it is further from the light than the stored value, it is shadowed. The technique is elegant and its artifacts are famous — surfaces shadowing themselves due to depth precision, which is corrected with a bias that must scale with surface slope, and blocky edges that follow from finite map resolution.
Performance work in a rasterizer is mostly about reducing draw calls and avoiding stalls where the processor and the graphics device wait on each other. Passing small per-draw values directly rather than through shared buffers removes a whole class of synchronization hazard.
See also10
L-System
A rewriting grammar that generates branching structures by repeated substitution.
Graphics & Rendering11 connections
Voxel
A volumetric pixel — a value on a regular three-dimensional grid.
Graphics & Rendering14 connections
Determinism
The property that identical inputs produce identical outputs, and the foundation of caching and verification.
Systems & Tooling61 connections
Procedural Generation
Creating content algorithmically rather than authoring it by hand.
Graphics & Rendering32 connections
Seeded Randomness
Pseudorandom generation from an explicit seed, so any output is reproducible.
Graphics & Rendering25 connections
Cellular Automaton
A grid of cells whose states evolve by a local rule applied simultaneously everywhere.
Graphics & Rendering14 connections
Game Feel
The perceptual layer between input and simulation, and the tuning that makes a control scheme read as responsive.
Play & Games28 connections
Roguelike
A genre defined by procedurally generated runs and permanent death, and the design pressures those create.
Play & Games28 connections
Game AI
Computer opponents built to be interesting to play against rather than optimal.
Play & Games26 connections
Pixel
The smallest addressable element of a digital image or screen, better understood as a point sample than as a little square, whose physical form, shape and density vary enough between devices that the web had to invent a separate reference pixel.
Graphics & Rendering6 connections
Linked from11
- Bézier CurveGraphics & Rendering
The smooth curve defined by a handful of control points that underlies fonts, vector drawings, animation easing, and the pen tool in every design app.
- Game FeelPlay & Games
The perceptual layer between input and simulation, and the tuning that makes a control scheme read as responsive.
- Graphics APIGraphics & Rendering
The programming interfaces through which software drives the GPU, from the driver-heavy OpenGL era to explicit modern APIs like Vulkan, Direct3D 12, and Metal.
- Graphics Processing UnitGraphics & Rendering
A processor built to run the same small program on thousands of data items at once, designed for pixels and now the engine of machine learning.
- Level of DetailGraphics & Rendering
Swapping an object's representation for a cheaper one as it becomes less visually significant, usually with distance.
- PixelGraphics & Rendering
The smallest addressable element of a digital image or screen, better understood as a point sample than as a little square, whose physical form, shape and density vary enough between devices that the web had to invent a separate reference pixel.
- Ray TracingGraphics & Rendering
Renders images by tracing individual light paths through a scene instead of projecting geometry onto a screen.
- ShaderGraphics & Rendering
A small program run on the graphics processor for every vertex or every pixel.
- SpriteGraphics & Rendering
A 2D image drawn and moved as a unit, from the hardware sprites of arcade machines and consoles to sprite sheets and atlases in modern engines.
- Vector GraphicsGraphics & Rendering
Images described as shapes and curves rather than a grid of pixels, so they stay sharp at any size, the basis of fonts, icons, logos, and maps.
- VoxelGraphics & Rendering
A volumetric pixel — a value on a regular three-dimensional grid.