[teraflop]

A "sprite" is a small bitmap image that can be moved around and rendered onto the screen at an arbitrary position. For example, Mario and his enemies in Super Mario Bros. are displayed as sprites.

"Hardware sprites" means you can tell the graphics hardware to draw the sprite itself, as opposed to the programmer having to redraw the background and then copy the sprite's pixel data on top of it for every frame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_(computer_graphics)

[alehyze]

yep :-) only thing to add: hardware sprites do not necessarily have to be small in size. What characterise them is the fact that you don't have to redraw them in software every frame in order to move them.