WebGL Programming Guide: Interactive 3D Graphics Programming with WebGL

Appendix A. No Need to Swap Buffers in WebGL

For those of you with some experience in developing OpenGL applications on PCs, you may have noticed that none of the examples in this book seem to swap color buffers, which is something that most OpenGL implementations require.

As you know, OpenGL uses two buffers: a “front” color buffer and a “back” color buffer with the contents of the front color buffer being displayed on the screen. Usually, when you draw something using OpenGL, it is drawn into the back color buffer. When you want to actually display something, you need to copy the contents of the back buffer to the front buffer to cause it to be displayed. If you were to draw directly into the front buffer, you would see visual artifacts (such ...