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

Framebuffer Attachments

When you render, you can send the results of that rendering to a number of places:

• The color buffer to create an image, or even multiple color buffers if you’re using multiple render targets (see “Writing to Multiple Renderbuffers Simultaneously” on Page 193).

• The depth buffer to store occlusion information.

• The stencil buffer for storing per-pixel masks to control rendering. Each of those buffers represents a framebuffer attachment, to which you can attach suitable image buffers that you later render into, or read from. The possible framebuffer attachment points are listed in Table 4.7.

Table 4.7. Framebuffer Attachments

Currently, there are two types of rendering surfaces you can associate with one of those attachments: ...