Chapter 4. Rendering with OpenGL

 

Once you understand the universe at the atomic level everything else is easy.

 
 --Richard P. Feynman

OpenGL was designed to provide two things: a portable yet powerful 3D graphics API and a narrow interface portal between the high-level calls and the low-level hardware interface routines. Although we’re interested mostly in the first item, it’s the second one that’s driving a lot of our actions. For OpenGL to be wildly successful, there’s got to be a synergy among the software developers (you!), the hardware platforms (mostly the video card manufacturers), and the operating systems (Windows 95, Windows NT, OS/2, and the UNIX flavors).

The operating systems have provided us with OpenGL implementations that we can ...

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