The Vocabulary of Game Engines

Gaming · 10 questions

Ten multiple-choice questions on core game-engine concepts, data structures, and rendering techniques.

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1. Which buffer stores each pixel's depth value for visibility tests?

   1. Color buffer
   2. Frame buffer
   3. Stencil buffer
   4. Z-buffer
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   D) Z-buffer

2. Which method reduces rendering cost by excluding objects outside the camera's viewing volume?

   1. Frustum culling
   2. Back-face culling
   3. Level of detail
   4. Occlusion culling
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   A) Frustum culling

3. What approach uses a lower-detail version of a model as it gets farther from the camera?

   1. Impostor
   2. LOD (Level of Detail)
   3. Instancing
   4. Normal mapping
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   B) LOD (Level of Detail)

4. Which technique uses a texture to alter surface normals in lighting calculations and suggest fine detail?

   1. Specular mapping
   2. Normal mapping
   3. Ambient occlusion
   4. Albedo mapping
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   B) Normal mapping

5. Which method traces ray-surface interactions to model effects such as reflection and refraction?

   1. Ray tracing
   2. Barycentric interpolation
   3. Phong shading
   4. Rasterization
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   A) Ray tracing

6. Which structure organizes object hierarchies and transforms through connected nodes?

   1. Physics world
   2. Render queue
   3. Scene graph
   4. Resource manager
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   C) Scene graph

7. Which screen-space technique approximates ambient occlusion between nearby surfaces?

   1. SSAO
   2. Depth of field
   3. Bloom
   4. Tone mapping
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   A) SSAO

8. Which shader produces color and other per-fragment outputs after rasterization?

   1. Compute shader
   2. Tessellation control shader
   3. Vertex shader
   4. Fragment shader
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   D) Fragment shader

9. Which technique processes many instances of the same geometry in one frame with few draw calls?

   1. Tessellation
   2. Batching
   3. Instancing
   4. Culling
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   C) Instancing

10. Which structure organizes bounding volumes in hierarchical nodes for broad-phase collision detection?

    1. Uniform spatial grid
    2. Octree
    3. Bounding volume hierarchy (BVH)
    4. Spatial hash table
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    C) Bounding volume hierarchy (BVH)