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Megabit - Multitexture

Megabit - 2^20 bits, or 1,048,576 bits. Often appreviated by "Mb" and generally it's referred to as "about a million bits" or "about a thousand kilobits". Broadband Internet speed is often given in megabits, such as "a T-1 line has about 1.54 megabits/second capability."

Megabyte - - 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. Often appreviated by "MB" and generally it's referred to as "about a million bytes" or "about a thousand kilobytes". Currently, this measurement is most used for file sizes, such as "a CD-ROM holds approximately 650 Megabytes".

Micron - Measurement of length; one thousandth of one millimeter, or one millionth of a meter. See Process.

MIDI - Stands for Music Instrument Digital Interface. Predetermined sound files that could be put together and edited in pitch, and tempo to create new music with minimal storage space required for songs. The upside is they are very small, so even before modems were considered fast, web sites could feature MIDI songs with minimal load times. However, the downside is that since they are synthesized, the quality is rather poor.

miniGL - A driver specifically made for a line of cards that uses part of the instructions found in OpenGL. This allows a card to work with a game optimized for OpenGL.

Mip-Mapping - The process of making an image or texture into smaller images by dividing by every power of two. For example: 1/4, 1/16, 1/32 of the original texture and so on. The benefit is that one can display high resolution textures (large textures) without a high resolution.

MMX - Intel's 57instructions developed for their line of x86 processors and specifically used multimedia for things such as sound and video. MMX was never really implimented as Intel had hoped and the term has all but disappeared.

Multi-sampling - An anti-aliasing technique similar to super-sampling, but more efficient. With "4x" or "2x2" anti-aliasing, multi-sampling still blows the resolution up by 2x in each direction (example: 800x600 blows up to 1600x1200), but the color is unchanged from the original for each of the four pixels, greatly reducing the required fill-rate. However, the bandwidth required for such an operation is still 4x the original required.

Multitexturing - See Multitexture.

Multitexture - The process of adding multiple textures to an object in the programming of a 3D game. They can be on top of each other in such processes as bump-mapping or in conjunction with each other to form one big 3D model. Graphics cards at one point did not support single-pass multitexturing, and required mulitple passes to add these effects, resulting in downgraded performance when enabled.

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