Diamond Multimedia 9600 PRO Shadow Mask, SmartShader, SmoothVision, Specular Highlight, Texel

Shadow Mask

In CRT monitors, the shadow mask is a metal plate full of tiny holes that is attached to the inside of the glass screen. It focuses the beams from the electron guns at the back of the CRT. The distance between these holes is called the dot pitch.

SmartShader™

SmartShader™ is ATI’s patented shader technology, providing custom transform and lighting effects for vertex shaders, allowing for finer control over the shape and position of 3D objects, as well as pixel shader effects that produce more accurate simulations of natural properties such as hair, metal, glass, and water in a real-time rendering environment. Important visual cues such as reflections, highlights, and shadows from multiple light sources can be rendered more speedily and accurately. It also increases the number of graphical effects that can be created, increasing overall performance while conserving memory bandwidth.

SmoothVision™

SmoothVision™ supports high-quality and high-performance anti-aliasing modes, both of which are required for creating high-quality 3D computer graphics. Both of these modes provide users with the ability to choose between 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, and 6x sampling, allowing for a total of 10 different anti-aliasing settings, providing incrementally better, more realistic visual displays. The SmoothVision™ technology maintains a high level of performance even when a high anti-aliasing sampling rate is selected.

Specular Highlight

The bright, usually small, intense light reflected from a 3D surface with a high refraction value. From the intensity and spread of this highlight users can differentiate between a “hard,” smooth surface, such as metal or porcelain, or a “soft,” textured surface, such as fabric or skin.

Texel

Short for “texture element,” the 3D equivalent of a pixel, describing the base unit of the surface of a 3D object, such as a sphere; for a 2D object, such as a circle, the base unit is a pixel.