Diamond Multimedia 9600 PRO manual Bitmap, Brightness, Buffer, Charisma Engine, Color Component

memory can only encode to either “0” or “1.” So a graphical bit depth of 1 means that the display can only show two colors, the black and white of a monochrome display. Four-bit color depth is capable of displaying 16 colors because there are only 16 different combinations of 4 bits (“0000”, “0001”, “0010”... to “1111”). Sixteen-bit color is capable of reproducing 65,536 colors, and 24-bit color can display up to 16,777,216 individual colors.

Bitmap

A bitmap is a graphic or character representation composed of individual pixels, arranged horizontally in rows. A monochrome bitmap uses one bit per pixel (bpp). Color bitmaps may use up to 32bpp, depending on the color depth selected.

Brightness

The amount of white or black that is applied to all colors onscreen. By making the screen “brighter” you are adding more white to it. This should not be confused with luminosity, which measures the actual light level emitted from the computer display.

Buffer

A name referring to portions of on-board video memory. One large buffer is always used to display images to the screen; this is the “display buffer.” The rest of offscreen memory is typically used by applications as back buffers, z-buffers, and texture buffers.

Charisma Engine™ II

Incorporating a programmable Vertex Shader pipeline, Charisma Engine™

IIis a transform and lighting engine designed to make 3D characters and transitions even more life-like.

Color Component

Three color components—Red, Green, and Blue—combine in various intensities to determine the color of each pixel on the screen. The values of each color component are graphically represented by a corresponding color curve.