Glossary of Computer Graphics Jargon

Computer graphics is full of obscure and difficult terminology!

But worry not. We at canmom are here to help! Here presenting the ongoing canmom glossary of computer graphics jargon.

2020 edition

light transport: buses, trams and low capacity rail
Metropolis light transport: art deco buses, trams and low capacity rail. gecko dancing robot optional but recommended
BRDF: Bordigist Red Dissenter Faction, a minor left communist group with six members, who formally disbanded in 1995
baking: very important for scenes containing bread
retopology: the academic study of experimenting with a receptive role in gay sex, but finding it disappointing
shader: a small program designed to run in parallel, which takes in vertex data and uses it to say cruel things to your enemies
triangle: a musical instrument
keyframe: a small gilded rectangle for displaying encryption data
deferred rendering: when you forget to render your project before the deadline
rigging: used to swing aboard an adjacent animation studio
NURBS: not an acronym, just stated with the proper emphasis
raymarching: a variant of raytracing usually seen at parades and sporting events
chromatic aberration: the offspring of a red dragon and a mind flayer
PBR: parboiled rice, used primarily as a religious offering in the context of computer graphics
Bezier curve: the number of years it would take you to earn the current net worth of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, thereby becoming more Bezy. monotonically increasing with time.

we are pleased to announce a new 2025 edition of the canmom glossary of computer graphics!

SPIR-V: used to make your hors-v go faster
Oren-Nayar: mathematical formula describing a big pizza pie
microfacet: unit of measurement for insincerity
cubemap: map() * map() * map() or map(map(map())). language-dependent
draw call: unsucesssful combination of the party games “pictionary” and “telephone”
demoscene: pronounced de-mosc-een. we think it’s a type of triangle?
GGX: common saying for when you just played a good game, so you want to give the other player a little kissie
blit: past participle of blight
RTGI: Real TransGender Info, a website from the 90s well known in the computer graphics scene
MSAA, FXAA, TAA, DLAA…: apotropaic incantation, used to drive away the demon known as Djyagiz
G-buffer: region of memory storing the value 0x47
pixel, voxel, texel, dexel, hogel: small pieces of data belonging respectively to a picture, a volume, a texture, a pokémon encyclopedia, and a pig

we are pleased to announce a new 2026 edition of the canmom glossary of computer graphics!

SDF: Self Defence Force. while, by treaty, GPUs tend to possess unspectacular armed forces, careful negotiation is important when sending data into GPU land to prevent counterinvasion of the PCIe bus
scene: a semi-ritualistic practice in which geometric primitives are dressed up in revealing shaders, tied up in a bounding volume hierarchy, and hit repeatedly with rays. not to be confused with ‘emo’
allocator: an adorable fusion of feline and saurian, commonly sighted in the foothills of Vulkan and northern DirectX 12
splatting: see “bukkake”
gaussian splatting: an esoteric type of scene originating at BDSM clubs in Göttingen; the researchers believe the association with Carl Friedrich Gauss is apocryphal, but what if, you know?
polar coordinates: once commonly seen in computer graphics, climate change has made this species severely endangered. conservation efforts are underway
SSS: materials such as skin and wax do not look believable unless you hiss like a snake while programming. this technique was discovered by accident in the mid 2000s as a fortuitous byproduct of wiring up an adder
visibility buffer: contains transgender people on March 31 of each year
amd: common misspelling of ‘and’
nvidia: common abbreviation for ‘invidious’
stanford bunny, stanford dragon, stanford armadillo: widely beloved furry OCs which get a lot of fanart from graphics programmers
softbody: take estrogen and you will be rewarded =)

vertex shader: a waterproof, breathable type of shader used to render outdoor clothing
fragment shader: used by witches to establish complex metafictional games
pixel shader: pseudonym used by fragment shaders rendering genre fiction
geometry shader: after widespread condemnation of the geometry shader’s untoward remarks about the GPU pipeline put an end to its career in graphics, it has sadly fallen into the sordid world of right-wing podcasts and tabloid columns
hull shader: a niche type of shader, primarily used by residents of yorkshire
domain shader: rejected proposal to speed up internet address resolution with GPUs
compute shader: the swiss army knife of shaders. literally; it has a corkscrew and stuff
mesh shader: mostly used for rendering nightclubs
tensor shader: shader which contains covariant and contravariant components in a curved space
ray generation shader: sorts rays into categories like ‘millennial’, ‘zoomer’ and ‘gen alpha’ for appropriately targeted mockery
closest hit shader: uses the full power of massively parallel computing to look up the nearest weed stash
miss shader: controversial beauty pageant; currently judged on a combination of categories like variable naming, instruction count and branch coherence