Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
to OpenGL graphics programming, and in some sense all the later OpenGL
developments are mainly evolutions of this approach. This version includes a
few of these evolutionary steps, including
Vertex buffer objects let you store vertex arrays in graphics memory to
reduce the amount of communication needed between the CPU and card.
Occlusion queries let you ask how many pixels a particular scene element
would occupy if displayed.
Texture-mapped point sprites let you create many small 2D objects for
uses such as particle systems.
Separate stencil operations for front and back faces give you beter sup-
port for shadowing.
OpenGL 3.x/GLSL 3.30
OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 3.00 is a major revision in the standard that reflected
the growing processing power in graphics cards. It introduces geometry shad-
ers, the next development in shader technology and the subject of Chapter 12.
It also includes several new types of objects to store structured data on the
graphics card.
Frame buffer objects let you render into non-displayable buffers for such
uses as render-to-texture.
Texture buffer objects allow you to use much larger texture arrays.
Uniform buffer objects let you define a collection of uniform variables so
that you can quickly switch between different sets of uniform variables
(typically different ways to present a set of primitives) in a single pro-
gram object or share the same set of uniform variables between different
program objects.
All OpenGL buffer objects share the capability to replace a range of data in the
buffer instead of having to replace the data one item at a time.
The OpenGL 3.* and GLSL 3.30 standards also add several new capabili-
ties not available in earlier versions:
For textures, you can now define a texture array (sometimes called an
array texture ) that contains a sequence of 1D or 2D textures of the same
size, so you can use different textures without having to do multiple tex-
ture bindings. You can use rectangular textures, which can be useful for
video processing, though these do not have bias or level-of-detail capabil-
ity. You can also query the size of a texture with the new textureSize( )
function.
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