A typical program that uses OpenGL begins with calls to open a window into the framebufer into which the program will draw. Calls are made to allocate a GL context which is then associated …

Driver capabilities will display a window containing the OpenGL information of your current graphics card. Here you can look for possible limitations, as well as the maximum number of …

One of the major accomplishments in the specification of OpenGL [16, 12] was the isolation of window system dependencies from OpenGL’s rendering model. The result is that OpenGL is …

In this chapter we will explain some basic shaders, showing the basic operations of the OpenGL Shading Language and how to achieve some simple effects. We’ll also cover the access to to …

The functions in the table below provide access to textures through samplers, as setup through the OpenGL API. Texture properties such as size, pixel format, number of dimensions, filtering …

Built-In Variables [7] Shaders communicate with fixed-function OpenGL pipeline stages and other shader executables through built-in variables.

Once a slot has been established, we can then send the attributes to OpenGL just like standard attributes and vertices. There are two ways to do this: immediate mode and vertex arrays.

In this section, we’ll be discussing the basic geometric primitives that OpenGL uses for rendering, as well as how to manage the OpenGL state which controls the appearance of those primitives.

The OpenGL Shading Language is actually several closely related languages. These languages are used to create shaders for each of the programmable processors contained in the OpenGL …

This chapter will focus on advanced illumination algorithms and other miscellaneous items like fractal computing, displacement shaders, and Perlin Noise usage. You should be confident …