Sprite (computer science)

In computer graphics, particularly in video gaming, sprites are a category of bitmaps drawn on a screen. They are usually small and partially transparent, allowing them to assume shapes other than rectangles. Sprites are typically used for characters in video games; for instance, the characters in Pac-Man are sprites. They are also often used for software icons.

Early video game hardware used to have special functions for drawing sprites, as writing them into the framebuffer was computationally expensive. Some also had advanced functions for detecting collisions, or for zooming and rotating them before drawing, like the Atari Lynx. Today this is usually not necessary; modern CPUs are typically fast enough to draw a large number of sprites by themselves. Even if this not sufficient, today's graphics hardware is often so flexible that it can assist the CPU in drawing sprites without having specialized support for this task.