Some hardware manufacturers used different terms, especially before sprite became common. The term was derived from the fact that sprites, rather than being part of the background data in the screen image table, instead "floated" on top without affecting the data in the framebuffer below, much like a ghost or mythological sprite. It was also used by Danny Hillis at Texas Instruments in the late 1970s. Beyond that, GPUs can render vast numbers of scaled, rotated, antialiased, partially translucent, very high resolution images in parallel with the CPU.Īccording to Karl Guttag, one of two engineers for the 1979 Texas Instruments TMS9918 video display processor, the term sprite came from David Ackley, a manager at TI. The CPUs in modern computers, video game consoles, and mobile devices are fast enough that bitmaps can be drawn into a frame buffer without special hardware assistance. For example, the Texas Instruments TMS9918 chip supports 32 sprites, but only 4 can appear on the same scan line.
The number of sprites which can be displayed per scan line is often lower than the total number of sprites a system supports. Sprites can be positioned or altered by setting attributes used during the hardware composition process. Hardware composition of sprites occurs as each scan line is prepared for the video output device, such as a CRT, without involvement of the main CPU and without the need for a full-screen frame buffer. Hardware varies in the number of sprites supported, the size and colors of each sprite, and special effects such as scaling or reporting pixel-precise overlap. Systems with hardware sprites include arcade video games of the 1970s and 1980s game consoles such as the Atari VCS (1977), ColecoVision (1982), Nintendo Entertainment System (1983), and Sega Genesis (1988) and home computers such as the TI-99/4A (1979), Atari 8-bit family (1979), Commodore 64 (1982), MSX (1983), Amiga (1985), and X68000 (1987). Use of the term has since become more general. Originally, the term sprite referred to fixed-sized objects composited together, by hardware, with a background.
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional bitmap that is integrated into a larger scene, most often in a 2D video game.
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