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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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monsters trying to spray you with evil alien goo). This calculation process is

called transformation and, as you might imagine, is extremely taxing to most

CPUs. Intel and AMD’s SIMD (SSE, etc.) processor extensions help to

calculate these transformations faster.

Once the CPU has determined the positions of all vertices, the system

begins to fill in the 3-D object. The process begins by drawing lines (the 3-D

term is edges) between vertices to construct the 3-D object from many

triangles. Why triangles? Well, mainly by consensus of game developers.

Any shape works, but triangles make the most sense from a mathematical

standpoint. I could go into more depth here, but that would require talking

about trigonometry, and I’m gambling you’d rather not read such a detailed

description! All 3-D games use triangles to connect vertices. The 3-D process

then groups triangles into various shapes called polygons. Figure 17-62

shows the same model as Figure 17-61, now displaying all of the connected

vertices to create a large number of polygons.

Figure 17-62 Connected vertices forming polygons on a 3-D character

Originally, the CPU handled these calculations to create triangles. With

the introduction of the GeForce 256 in 1999, this transform process was

moved from the CPU to the video card, greatly accelerating 3-D

performance.

The last step in second-generation games was texturing. Every 3-D game

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