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pixel lane / fragment lane
One slot in the GPU's parallel machinery that processes a single pixel, several of which run side by side at once.
GPUs use SIMD (single instruction, multiple data): one instruction operates on many pieces of data simultaneously. A pixel lane (or fragment lane) is one of those parallel tracks, each handling a different pixel, so 'four pixel lanes at once' means four pixels march through the same shader code in lockstep. This is why GPUs are fast at graphics — they shade many pixels in parallel rather than one at a time.
See also
- rasterizerThe GPU component that turns geometric shapes into the actual grid of pixels that fill them.
- pipelineThe ordered assembly line of stages a GPU runs to turn 3D geometry into the colored pixels on screen.
- primitiveThe basic shape a GPU actually draws — a point, a line, or a triangle.