Neha Patil (Editor)

Swizzling (computer graphics)

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In computer graphics, swizzling means rearranging the elements of a vector. For example, if A = {1,2,3,4}, where the components are x, y, z, and w respectively, you could compute B = A.wwxy, whereupon B would equal {4,4,1,2}. This is common in GPGPU applications.

In terms of linear algebra, this is equivalent to multiplying by a matrix whose rows are standard basis vectors. If A = ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ) T , then swizzling A as above looks like

A . w w x y = [ 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 ] [ 1 2 3 4 ] = [ 4 4 1 2 ] .

References

Swizzling (computer graphics) Wikipedia