User`s guide

Buffers Your ATI accelerator card includes on-board memory

which is used in a number of ways. Buffers are portions

of this memory used as temporary storage on your card.

One large buffer is always used to display the screen you

see; this is the “display buffer”. The rest of offscreen

memory is used by applications as back buffers,

z-buffers, and texture buffers.

CHARISMA

ENGINE

™

Supports transforms, clipping and lighting at 62.5

million triangles per second at peak processing

capability.

Color Depth Color depth is the number of color shades available on

your display. The color depth of your monitor usually

includes; 256 colors (8-bpp), Thousands of colors

(16-bpp), and Millions of colors (32-bpp), and is also

measured in bits per pixel (bpp). You can switch your

color depth using the ATI Popup Menu, Apple’s Control

Strip, or the Monitors control panel. Higher bit-depths

require more display buffer memory.

Note: The ATI 3D Accelerator only functions in

Thousands and Millions of colors modes.

Fog The blending of an object with a fixed color as objects

or pixels increase distance away from the viewer.

Frame Buffer Memory buffer used to store the image being displayed.

Gouraud Shading One of the more sophisticated shading methods used to

produce a smooth lighting effect across a 3D object. A

specific color is used at each vertice of a triangle or

polygon, and interpolated across the entire face.

HYPER Z

™

II A memory bandwidth saving technology that boosts

rendering performance.

MIP Map Multum In Parvum (Latin) means “many in one.” It is a

method of increasing quality of a texture map by storing

multiple resolutions of the same image and dynamically

switching between them depending on the size and

depth of the object being textured.

Offscreen Memory An area of memory used to preload and place images so

that they can be quickly drawn on the screen. Offscreen

memory refers to all the memory on your ATI

accelerator card that is not taken up by the front buffer,

which holds the display screen that you see.