Digital images are composed of dots arranged on a grid. Each of these little dots is called a pixel, a contraction of the term 'picture element'. The same is true of the texture graphics that get drawn onto polygons in 3D games; a texel simply a pixel within a texture image. As part of their performance specifications, graphics cards often describe how many texels they can process each second. This is their texture fillrate: the number of times a GPU can access a texture in a single second.