OpenGL is a cross-language, cross-platform API for drawing 2D and 3D graphics on screen through the GPU within our computer's graphics chip. Computer graphics technology has been evolving rapidly over the years—so rapidly that the software industry can hardly keep up with its pace.

In 2008, Khronos Group, the company that maintains and develops OpenGL, announced the release of the OpenGL 3.0 specification, which created a huge uproar and controversy throughout the industry. That was mainly because OpenGL 3.0 was supposed to deprecate the entire fixed-function pipeline from the OpenGL API, and it was simply an impossible task for the big players to make the sudden switch overnight from a fixed-function pipeline to a programmable pipeline. This resulted in two different major versions of OpenGL being maintained.

In this chapter, we will use the newer OpenGL 3 instead of the older, deprecated OpenGL 2. The coding style and syntax are very different between this two versions, which makes the switch over very troublesome. However, the performance improvement will make it worth the time switching over to OpenGL 3.