To make a 3-D image, the graphics card first creates a wire frame out of straight
lines. Then, it rasterizes the image (fills in the remaining pixels). It also
adds lighting, texture and color.

3D projection
Any method of mapping 3D points to a 2D plane. As
most current methods for displaying graphical data are based on planar 2D
media.

Graphics pipeline (Rendering pipeline)

Stages of the graphics pipeline:

• 3D geometric primitives

  First, the scene is created out of geometric primitives.
  Traditionally this is done using triangles

• Modeling and transformation

  Transform from the local coordinate system to the 3d world coordinate system.

• Camera transformation

  Transform the 3d world coordinate system into the 3d camera coordinate system,
  with the camera as the origin.

• Lighting

  Illuminate according to lighting and reflectance. If a model of teapot is a
  brilliant white color, but in a totally black room, then the camera sees it as
  black. In this step the effect of lighting and reflections are calculated.

• Projection transformation

  Transform the 3d world coordinates into the 2d view of the camera, for instance
  the object the camera is centered on would be in the center of the 2d view of
  the camera.

  In the case of a Perspective projection, objects which are
  distant from the camera are made smaller.

  In an orthographic projection, objects retain their original size
  regardless of distance from the camera.

• Clipping

  Geometric primitives that now fall completely outside of the viewing frustum
  will not be visible and are discarded at this stage.

• Scan conversion or rasterization

  Rasterization is the process by which the 2D image space representation
  of the scene is converted into raster format and the correct resulting pixel
  values are determined. From now on, operations will be carried out on each
  single pixel. This stage is rather complex, involving multiple steps often
  referred as a group under the name of pixel pipeline.

• Texturing,fragment shading

  At this stage of the pipeline individual fragments (or
  pre-pixels) are assigned a color based on values interpolated from the vertices
  during rasterization, from a texture in memory, or from a shader program.

   
  Another term you should be familiar with:
  Double
  buffering
  uses a memory buffer to address the
  flicker problems associated with multiple paint operations. When double
  buffering is enabled, all paint operations are first rendered to a memory
  buffer instead of the drawing surface on the screen. After all paint operations
  are completed, the memory buffer is copied directly to the drawing surface
  associated with it. Because only one graphics operation is performed on the
  screen, the image flickering associated with complex painting operations is
  eliminated.