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

Renderbuffers

Renderbuffers are effectively memory managed by OpenGL that contains formatted image data. The data that a renderbuffer holds takes meaning once it is attached to a framebuffer object, assuming that the format of the image buffer matches what OpenGL is expecting to render into (e.g., you can’t render colors into the depth buffer).

As with many other buffers in OpenGL, the process of allocating and deleting buffers is similar to what you’ve seen before. To create a new renderbuffer, you would call glGenRenderbuffers().

void glGenRenderbuffers(GLsizei n, GLuint *ids);

Allocate n unused renderbuffer object names, and return those names in ids. Names are unused until bound with a call to glBindRenderbuffer().

Likewise, a call to ...