Texel:
These are the dots that make up the texture maps (often erroneously called bitmaps). Texture maps scale larger or smaller depending on whether the texture mapped object is moving nearer or further away. Thus each dot which defines a color may correspond to the screen pixels at a ratio inferior or superior to 1:1. For this reason, contrarily to the pixels which make up a standard bitmap, a texel's size may be different to that of a screen pixel.

 

 

Texture:
Texture is the grain of an object, allowing you to identify the displayed material: metal, liquid, polished, rough, veined, etc. In 3D vocabulary, the color of the material is added to the texture, and then texture facing links the grain of the object with its color. The resulting color may however be other than the final color appearing on-screen since other details, such as light effects, may also be taken into consideration.

 

 

Texture mapping:
Following the Z-buffering process, this procedure projects textures or patterns onto the surface of polygons making up a 3D graphical object. This method is very efficient for producing the appearance of texture. See also mapping.

 

 

Texture memory:
This memory is used to store information concerning textures. Utilization of the graphics board's memory is usually shared between textures, Z-buffering and two frame buffers.

 

 

TFT (Thin Film Transistor):
A monitor made with TFT technology is a liquid crystal display (LCD) that has a transistor for each pixel. This means that the current that illuminates pixels can be smaller and can thus be turned on and off more rapidly. TFT is also referred to as active matrix technology. TFT/LCD is currently the most popular type of flat panel display and is widely used in notebook and laptop computers, projectors and TVs.

 

 

Tile rendering (or Tile based rendering):
The principle behind Tile rendering is that the display is split into small areas called tiles that are rendered independently. The results are impressive performance in games and a perfect image quality.

 

 

Translucency:
The quality of an object to let light pass through it, but diffusing it so that objects on the other side cannot be clearly distinguished. Frosted glass is translucent whereas clear glass is transparent.

 

 

Triangle parameters (100% hardware):
When all gradient data needed for the graphics engine is derived internally, freeing the CPU from calculating these parameters and eliminating the need for consequent transfer.

 

 

Trilinear filtering:
Bilinear filtering followed by a second image filtering to eliminate imperfections and defaults at texture intersection.

 

 

24-bit color:
24-bit color images are made up of three 8-bit color channels (RGB), each of which contains up to 256 colors. When all three are combined they provide up to 16 million colors (a.k.a. True Color).