OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference, Seventh Edition

Chapter 3. Following the Pipeline

What You’ll Learn in This Chapter

• What each of the stages in the OpenGL pipeline does.

• How to connect your shaders to the fixed-function pipeline stages.

• How to create a program that uses every stage of the graphics pipeline simultaneously.

In this chapter, we will walk all the way along the OpenGL pipeline from start to finish, providing insight into each of the stages, which include fixed-function blocks and programmable shader blocks. You have already read a whirlwind introduction to the vertex and fragment shader stages. However, the application that you constructed simply drew a single triangle at a fixed position. If we want to render anything interesting with OpenGL, we’re going to have to learn ...