What "inline 3D graphics" means for a terminal Terminals have rendered raster images for years. iTerm2 shipped an inline image protocol over a decade ago. The Kitty graphics protocol followed, WezTerm and a handful of others adopted variants, and Sixel — the DEC protocol that dates back to the 1980s — got a second life as Mintty and xterm cleaned up their support. None of those handle 3D geometry. They handle pixel buffers. A terminal that advertises inline 3D graphics is making a different claim. Either it ships a small OpenGL or WebGPU surface that lives inside the cell grid, or it hands a scene description to a GPU context the emulator owns, or it tunnels frames through one of the existing image protocols at high frequency. The distinction matters because each path has different costs. Pixel streaming is universally compatible but burns bandwidth and CPU on decode. A true embedded GL surface gives you interactive frame rates but locks you to the host process and one rendering backend.…