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swizzle
Reordering or duplicating the components of a vector or colour, like turning RGBA into BGRA.
In graphics code, values often come in small vectors (x,y,z,w or r,g,b,a), and swizzling means reading them in a rearranged order with a shorthand like .bgra or .xxy. It is a cheap, common operation for matching colour layouts or reshuffling data. The hardware supports it directly, so it costs almost nothing.
See also
- texel / texelFetchA texel is one pixel of a texture; texelFetch grabs exactly that pixel with no smoothing.
- texture samplingReading a smoothly-interpolated colour from a texture image inside a shader.
- storage widthHow many bits are used to hold a single value in memory — typically 8, 16, or 32.