OpenGL® Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL®, Version 4.5 with SPIR-V, Ninth Edition

Chapter 11. Memory

Chapter Objectives

After reading this chapter, you’ll be able to do the following:

• Read from and write to memory from shaders.

• Perform simple mathematical operations directly on memory from shaders.

• Synchronize and communicate between different shader invocations.

Everything in the OpenGL pipeline thus far has essentially been side-effect free. That is, the pipeline is constructed from a sequence of stages, either programmable (such as the vertex and fragment shaders) or fixed function (such as the tessellation engine) with well-defined inputs and outputs (such as vertex attributes or color outputs to a framebuffer). Although it has been possible to read from arbitrary memory locations using textures or texture buffer ...