Glossary — The Mesa 3D Graphics Library latest documentation

# Glossary

GLSL

  GL Shading Language. The official, common high-level shader language used in GL 2.0 and above.

layer

  This term is used as the name of the “3rd coordinate” of a resource. 3D textures have zslices, cube maps have faces, 1D and 2D array textures have array members (other resources do not have multiple layers). Since the functions only take one parameter no matter what type of resource is used, use the term “layer” instead of a resource type specific one.

LOD

  Level of Detail. Also spelled “LoD”. The value that determines when the switches between mipmaps occur during texture sampling.

MSAA

  Multi-Sampled Anti-Aliasing. A basic anti-aliasing technique that takes multiple samples of the depth buffer, and uses this information to smooth the edges of polygons.

NPOT

  Non-power-of-two. Usually applied to textures which have at least one dimension which is not a power of two.

TCL

  Transform, Clipping, & Lighting. The three stages of preparation in a rasterizing pipeline prior to the actual rasterization of vertices into fragments.