Introduction

Introduction

I don't claim that I am a good tutor neither do I claim to be a good author :D. I just thought to share some knowledge and what I learned so far about newer OpenGL 4+ versions. There are a lot of tutorials and references out three but alomost none (or less) of them are going into the usage of OpenGL 4.5+.

OpenGL 4.5

First of all, why in the world would someone still want to use OpenGL for their projects when Vulkan is out? Here are couple of reasons I think are valid (At least in my point of view):

• Tons of current projects still depend on OpenGL

• Older projects that will not be ported depend on OpenGL and needs maintanence.

• OpenGL can be fast when used correct.

• Development compared to Vulkan can be faster because intstructions are simpler.

In this book we will focus on OpenGL 4.5 and above. We will use new funtions to create buffers, textures etc. I think it is good to use directly OpenGL 4.5 and above because Mesa, Nvidia and ATI already support this in their drivers so we can say this should be the minimum level required. This book is not about mobile development. We will use the newest features of OpenGL.

For simple projects OpenGL is totally sufficient and fun to use.