GRAPHICS

A computer screen consists of pixels arranged in a Cartesian coordinate system. This is commonly called a raster pixel display. Computer graphics algorithms change the colors of sets of pixels. Modern computers—even mobile phones—include specialized hardware-based high-performance implementations of graphics algorithms that are orders of magnitude faster than what can be implemented in software on the CPU. The challenge in real-world development is how best to use the graphics hardware; it would be extremely unusual to implement any of the techniques described in the following sections. Nevertheless, you may encounter problems involving the implementation of graphics algorithms both to test your understanding of computer graphics and to examine your ability to translate mathematical concepts into working code.

Often, the algorithm to generate a raster pixel image is based on a geometric equation. Because a computer screen has a finite number of pixels, translating...