OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

OpenGL’s Programmable Pipeline

While Chapter 1 provided a brief introduction to OpenGL’s rendering pipeline, here we’ll describe in greater detail the various stages and what operations they carry out. Version 4.3’s graphical pipeline contains four processing stages, plus a compute stage, each of which you control by providing a shader.

1. The Vertex shading stage receives the vertex data that you specified in your vertex-buffer objects, processing each vertex separately. This stage is mandatory for all OpenGL programs and must have a shader bound to it. We describe vertex shading operation in Chapter 3, “Drawing with OpenGL”.

2. The Tessellation shading stage is an optional stage that generates additional geometry within the OpenGL pipeline, ...