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Software Engineering vocabulary · Architecture, Design Patterns and Graphics

Draw call

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, draw call means: A 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.

In Turkish: draw call, çizim çağrısı

How it is used

A key performance number on mobile and older hardware. Programmers reduce draw calls with batching, texture atlases and combined meshes. They say a scene has too many draw calls or is CPU-bound.

Example sentences

  1. The market scene has 3,000 draw calls; we need to get it under 500 for mobile.

  2. Batching the street lamps cut our draw calls by a third.

Common collocations

  • reduce draw calls
  • draw call count
  • batch draw calls
  • CPU-bound
  • 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.
  • optimizationWork that makes a game run faster and use less memory, battery or bandwidth, for example by simplifying models, reducing draw calls or rewriting slow code.
  • polycountThe number of polygons, usually triangles, that make up a 3D model or a whole scene. Fewer polygons are faster to draw but show less detail.
  • profilerA tool that measures where a game spends its time and memory, frame by frame, so developers can find what makes it slow instead of guessing.
  • spriteA 2D image used as an object in a game, such as a character, an enemy, a coin or an explosion. Several sprites shown one after another create an animation.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Architecture, Design Patterns and Graphics

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