M
- Mach bands
- Bands of color that are not smoothly blended across a 3-D primitive.
- material
- A property that determines how a surface reflects light. A material has two components: an (whether it emits light) and a , whose brightness is determined by a power setting.
- mesh
- A set of faces, each of which is described by a simple polygon.
- mipmap
- Also known as MIP map (Latin: multium in parvo, translated "much in little"). A sequence of textures, each of which is a progressively lower-resolution, prefiltered representation of the same image. A higher-resolution image is used when a visible object is close to the viewer; as the object moves farther away (and gets smaller), lower-resolution images are used.
- mixing
- In DirectSound, the process of combining that are playing, and writing the result to the , which supplies audio data to the sound hardware. There is no limit to the number of buffers that can be mixed, except the available processing time.
- Mode X
- A hybrid display mode derived from the standard VGA Mode 13. This mode allows the use of up to 256 KB of display memory (rather than the 64 KB allowed by Mode 13) by using the VGA display adapter's EGA multiple video plane system.
- model coordinates
- Coordinates that are relative to a local origin. See also and .
- model space
- The frame of reference (used by ) that uses vertices relative to a single 3-D model's local origin.
- multipass texture blending
- The repeated rendering of a 3-D primitive while blending on a texture with each pass. This technique is widely used to achieve a variety of special effects.