What does render mean?

Answer 1

rendered

There are several ways this word is used.

Here is a just a short list. 1. to render = perform social acts such as causing, giving, paying, surrendering, submitting, etc. e.g. Using her judo skills she rendered the attacker helpless.

2. to render = translate, perform or interpret. (music, drama etc) e.g. At the concert, Pavorotti rendered the famous operatic piece Nessun Dorma in his usual outstanding and inimitable way.

3. to render = to cover brick or stone with plaster e.g. The house had lovely walls, all perfectly rendered with pink plaster.

See also:

to rend = to tear in two (physically or metaphorically) (archaic)

Answer 2

The algorithms vary (z-buffer, ray-trace, etc.) but generally render means to create a picture composed of discrete pixels. Each pixel has a color

associated with it and the array is what you see when you look at a computer monitor.
Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model by means of computer programs. The model is a description of three-dimensional objects in a strictly defined language or data structure. It would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information. The image is a digital image or raster graphics image. The term may be by analogy with an "artist's rendering" of a scene. 'Rendering' is also used to describe the process of calculating effects in a video editing file to produce final video output.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_(computer_graphics)