OpenGL Extensions Guide

OpenGL Extensions Guide Book Description

OpenGL is the premier environment for developing 2D and 3D graphics and game applications. The interface has been the choice of game programmers, mainly because of its cross-platform operability, but also because it is constantly evolving to keep pace with hardware advances in the form of extensions. Until now, the game industry was lacking one single, concise reference to help make sense of the dozens of extensions available. The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides this much needed resource and concentrates specifically on the extensions most important to developing modern 3D games. The book is laid out in an intuitive fashion, discussing groups of extensions that modify or augment similar components of the base OpenGL architecture. In addition, the text focuses mainly on operational and implementation issues, discussing the underlying mathematics of an extension only when it is critical to understanding that extension's functionality.

KEY FEATURES Discusses all of the essential OpenGL extensions in detail and provides an invaluable reference tool to the OpenGL programmer


Concentrates on practical usage of extensions and discusses underlying mathematical details only where necessary


Provides the history, intended usage, and dependencies of specific extensions, and provides examples of when to use them throughout


Discusses extensions sanctioned by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board), multi-vendor extensions, and vendor-specific extensions developed by Nvidia Corporation and ATI Technologies, Inc.


Includes a companion CD-ROM with official extension specifications, presentations covering vendor-specific extensions, and sample code demonstrating usage of vendor-specific extensions.
About the Author
Eric Lengyel (Sunnyvale, CA), best-selling author of Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, is the Chief Technology Officer for the game engine development studio Terathon Software. He holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Virginia Tech and has written several articles for gamasutra.com and the Game Programming Gems series (Charles River Media).

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