Just a bit more detail on the subject. There are basically two ways to display a 2D image, as a vector or a raster.
Rasters are what most people think of when they think of 2D graphics. When they are produced, every single dot in the image must be drawn on the screen. Uncompressed files saves all of this information as one byte per pixel per color channel. This means the file size very large as the resolution increases. The advantage is that working with raster images most closely resembles real life 2D art and is much easier to do special effects with. Another disadvantage is that the image is really only optimized to be printed at its original size.
Vectors are exactly what the name implies, mathematical representations of lines, angles, and curves. Instead of drawing a every pixel in a line, you are only marking the start and endpoints as well as the degrees of angles and curves. This allows for the information to be scaled almost infinitely with virtually no loss of quality. When first introduced, vector graphics were too computer intensive to produce anything more than logos and other fairly simple objects. Since then, both computers and the applications have gotten much more sophisticated, and people are creating very complicated graphics and in some cases near photographic images in vector format.
As a side note, traditional displays draw all images on the screen as a raster format. Traditional oscilloscopes and other testing equipment, as well as old video games like Asteroids and Tempest draws the screen in vector form. |