Sprite(精灵)

The term sprite refers to a 2D bitmap image that can be moved around the screen independently of everything else.  

On some of these early home computers, programmers assigned a bitmap image to ahardware sprite, which was then rendered on top of everything else drawn on screen.The sprite’s position could then be changed by simply updating the location within a CPU register. No other drawing code was needed.These hardware based sprites allowed early home computers to perform functions that would just not have been possible with the limited hardware resources of the day. Sprites were most often used in games to represent the player ship, missiles, bullets, and the enemies you were fighting.

  

The iPhone is many times more powerful than the home computers we had back in the1980s. Its GPU, particularly in the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, and iPad, allows it to achievesome impressive visual effects, thanks to their support for OpenGL ES 2.0. 

What Is OpenGL ES?

OpenGL ES is a subset of the OpenGL graphics language for mobile devices (ES stands forEmbedded Systems).The first-generation iPhone and the second-generation iPhone 3G onlysupported OpenGL ES 1.1, and the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad support both OpenGL ES1.1 and 2.0. The main benefit of OpenGL ES 2.0 is its support of shader language. This allows the programmer to define how the GPU should process data rather than only being able to use functions that have been predefined.