OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1, Seventh Edition

Appendix E. Order of Operations

This book describes all the operations performed between initial specification of vertices and final writing of fragments into the framebuffer. The chapters of this book are arranged in an order that facilitates learning, rather than in the exact order in which these operations are actually performed. Sometimes the exact order of operations doesn’t matter—for example, surfaces can be converted to polygons and then transformed, or transformed first and then converted to polygons, with identical results—and different implementations of OpenGL might do things differently.

This appendix describes a possible order; any implementation is required to yield equivalent results. If you want more details than are ...