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

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, we have covered geometry shaders—a shader stage that runs per-primitive, has access to all vertices in the primitive, and can create and destroy geometry as it passes through the OpenGL pipeline. It can even change the types of primitives. The geometry shader can be used for user-controlled culling, geometric transformations, and even sorting algorithms. It provides access to features such as multiple viewports and rendering into texture arrays, three-dimensional textures, and cube maps. The geometry shader can be instanced, which when combined with its other features is an extremely powerful tool. The geometry shader is perhaps the most versatile and flexible shader stage. Geometry shaders even have their own ...