Sprite (computer graphics)

Sprite is a name for a special category of bitmaps that are drawn on a computer screen, mainly in video games. They are usually small and partially transparent. The latter allows them to appear in any shape and not only the bitmap's rectangular form. Sprites are typically used for characters in video games, for instance in Pac-Man the main character and the ghosts are sprites.

Early video game hardware used to have special hardware 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 anymore. Todays CPUs are fast enough to draw a large number of sprites by themseved, and 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.