OpenGL SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference, Fourth Edition

Part II. The New Testament

For many years the fixed pipeline reigned supreme as the model for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. In comparison, the transition to programmable hardware was virtually overnight. In a single generation of consumer graphics hardware, we went from barely configurable texture units and some meager vertex programmability to fully programmable graphics pipelines.

Now, it is possible to dramatically increase realism by writing code that gets executed on the GPU (graphics processing unit). This code can add tremendous flexibility to how vertices and individual fragments onscreen are processed. In addition, these tasks are almost embarrassingly parallel in nature. Multiple execution units designed solely for graphics processing ...