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scanline
A single horizontal row of pixels being filled in as a shape is drawn.
When a renderer converts a triangle or other shape into pixels, it often works one horizontal row at a time. Each such row is a scanline. Filling shape by scanline is efficient because a row of pixels is contiguous in memory and the shape's left/right edges can be computed incrementally as you move down.
See also
- scanline rasterizerThe engine that turns triangles and shapes into pixels by filling them one horizontal row at a time.
- row-band parallelismSpeeding up rendering by splitting the image into horizontal strips and giving each strip to a different worker thread.
- shaderA small program that runs on the GPU to compute part of how a scene is drawn.