Game Rendering Terminology

It helps to understand the terms a graphics programmer uses, so you can talk the talk.

Draw call: definition here
Texture fetch: definition here
Fill rate: definition here
Transform cost: definition here
Frame rate: definition here
Frame buffer: definition here
VRAM, video memory: definition here
GPU: The Graphics Processing Unit is a parallel processor for floating point operations; it's the heart & soul of your graphics card. It's mostly used for rendering calculations, but it can also be tricked into doing physics, particle systems, vertex skinning, real-time texture compression, etc. It frees the CPU (Central Processing Unit) to handle the rest of the processing tasks in the game like transforms, AI, sound, etc.
Vertex Cache: definition here
Vertex Shader: definition here
Pixel Shader: definition here
Culling: If the view camera (the viewer's eye) can't see it, don't bother processing it and only worry about what the view camera can see.
: Trivial Accept/Reject Culling, Back-Face Culling, Occlusion Culling, Clipping.
Z-buffer, Depth Buffer: definition here

Threads to distill:

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GameRenderingTerminology