Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Chapter 16. Survey of Real-Time 3D Graphics Platforms

16.1. Introduction

Now that you’ve seen the core ideas that let us use computer graphics to make pictures, we’re going to describe to you the variety of approaches that have been developed to encapsulate this knowledge. Such approaches have the benefit of isolating the programmer from the details of the graphics hardware, which helps with maintainability of programs. They also let application developers concentrate on things specific to their application domain, rather than the way that images are presented to the user. The variety of approaches available is due, in part, to the pattern of hardware development, which is where we’ll begin our survey.

As impressive as the rate of improvement ...