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

Transform Feedback

Transform feedback can be considered a stage of the OpenGL pipeline that sits after all of the vertex-processing stages and directly before primitive assembly and rasterization.¹ Transform feedback captures vertices as they are assembled into primitives (points, lines, or triangles) and allows some or all of their attributes to be recorded into buffer objects. In fact, the minimal OpenGL pipeline that produces useful work is a vertex shader with transform feedback enabled—no fragment shader is necessary. Each time a vertex passes through primitive assembly, those attributes that have been marked for capture are recorded into one or more buffer objects. Those buffer objects can then be read back by the application, or their ...