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Game Development vocabulary · Rendering, Graphics & Performance

Rendering

Meaning in game development, with examples

/ˈrendərɪŋ/nounCore term

In game development, rendering means: The process in which the computer turns a 3D or 2D scene, with its models, textures and lights, into the final image shown on the screen.

In Turkish: render, görüntü oluşturma, işleme

How it is used

Games use real-time rendering, which must produce many images every second, while films can use offline rendering that takes minutes or hours per frame. Programmers in this area are graphics or rendering engineers. The verb is render.

Example sentences

  1. Real-time rendering at 60 fps means each frame has to be ready in about 16 milliseconds.

  2. We switched to a simpler rendering path for older phones.

Common collocations

  • real-time rendering
  • rendering engineer
  • rendering pipeline
  • rendering path
  • shaderA small program that runs on the graphics card and decides how surfaces look, for example their color, lighting, shine and transparency, or effects like water and fire.
  • GPUShort for graphics processing unit: the chip that renders a game's images by running shaders and drawing millions of pixels every frame. The CPU handles most of the game logic.
  • frame rateThe number of images a game draws on the screen each second, measured in frames per second (fps). A higher, steadier frame rate makes the game look and feel smoother.
  • draw callA command the CPU sends to the graphics card to draw a group of polygons with one material. Too many draw calls per frame can slow a game down.
  • post-processingVisual effects applied to the whole image after the scene has been rendered, such as bloom, motion blur, color grading and depth of field.

More terms: Rendering, Graphics & Performance

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