What does opengl mean

Ultimately, every graphics program must go through a graphics API. Draw some text? Send the data to the GPU. The GPU draws it. Remember, your code can't talk to the screen. Before OpenGL and DirectX, the games had to use special instructions depending on what graphics card you had. When you bought a new game, you had to check carefully if your card was supported, or you couldn't use the game. A library is delivered by the manufacturer of the card.

If they follow the specification, you are guaranteed that games will work if they also follow the same specification. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit GPU , to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. What is the purpose of a graphics library such as OpenGL? Ask Question. Asked 9 years, 3 months ago. Active 1 year, 11 months ago. Viewed 17k times.

Improve this question. Have you read en. Modelling software serves a completely different purpose. I have read that. I know what modelling software does.

The problem is the only tutorials for graphics libraries I can find are demonstrating how to model things with code, which doesn't make sense in real projects when you're using external software to get your graphics. I simply don't understand what part graphics libraries play in graphics. OpenGL or Direct3D are fairly low-level abstractions. They're the building blocks that higher level tools are built upon. An example of why I'm confused as to it's purpose, is that to implement graphics for a 2D game, you essentially constantly load images and then draw them to the screen.

The only things involved are the programming language and the images you want to load. An unlimited amount of viewing and modeling transformations can be applied to the OpenGL objects, giving developers an infinite amount of possibilities. Home : Glossary : OpenGL. Wright, Benjamin Lipchak, and Nicholas Haemel. Online, the most useful place to visit for OpenGL information is www. We also have a simple OpenGL example of our own. It contains routines for setting up viewing and projection matrices, polygonal tesselation and surface rendering.

GLU routines begin with the prefix glu. GLX routines begin with the prefix glx. Definitions by TechTerms. Tech Factor?

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