Blitter

When first introduced the computer's CPU typically had difficultly moving the bitmaps around in memory fast enough to be able to use CPU-driven blitting as the primary method of character graphics display. For some time in the 1980s many home computers included either a co-processor or a special-purpose chip known as a blitter for this task. The CPU would send the bit blit operations to the blitter, which would then carry out the operation much faster than the CPU could.

One of the first personal computers that used this solution was the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga's OCS included a blitter. On top of the ability to copy and manipulate large areas of graphics, The Amiga's blitter also included line drawing and area-filling hardware. Some models of the Atari ST also included a blitter (given the capitalisation BLiTTER). Not only was the ST's blitter not as powerful as the Amiga's blitter, but because it was not introduced into the ST line right from the beginning, not many developers made use of it, as the perceived user-base was small.

Modern graphics processing units found on most graphics cards can be regarded as descendants of the early "blitters".

See Also