We will be using OpenGL as the primary basis for 3D graphics programming. The original version of OpenGL was released in 1992 by a company named Silicon Graphics, which was known for its graphics workstations—powerful, expensive computers designed for intensive graphical applications. (Today, you probably have more graphics computing power on your smart phone.) OpenGL is supported by the graphics hardware in most modern computing devices, including desktop computers, laptops, and many mobile devices. This section will give you a bit of background about the history of OpenGL and about the graphics hardware that supports it.
In the first desktop computers, the contents of the screen were managed directly by the CPU. For example, to draw a line segment on the screen, the CPU would run a loop to set the color of each pixel that lies along the line. Needless to say, graphics could take up a lot of the CPU's time. And graphics performance was very slow, compared to what we expect today. So what has changed? Computers are much faster in general, of course, but the big change is that in modern computers, graphics processing is done by a specialized component called a GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit. A GPU includes processors for doing graphics computations; in fact, it can include a large number of such processors that work in parallel to greatly speed up graphical operations. It also includes its own dedicated memory for storing things like images and lists of coordinates. GPU processors have very fast access to data that is stored in GPU memory—much faster than their access to data stored in the computer's main memory.
To draw a line or perform some other graphical operation, the CPU simply has to send commands, along with any necessary data, to the GPU, which is responsible for actually carrying out those commands. The CPU offloads most of the graphical work to the GPU, which is optimized to carry out that work very quickly. The set of commands that the GPU understands make up the API of the GPU. OpenGL is an example of a graphics API, and most GPUs support OpenGL in the sense that they can understand OpenGL commands, or at least that OpenGL commands can efficiently be translated into commands that the GPU can understand.
OpenGL is not the only graphics API. The best-known alternatives are probably the proprietary APIs used by Apple and Microsoft. Apple's MacOS uses an API known as Metal, while Microsoft Windows uses Direct3D. Nevertheless, OpenGL can currently still be used on MacOS and Windows. Furthermore, a newer open API named Vulkan has been defined as a replacement for OpenGL itself. Vulkan is a complex, low-level API designed more for speed and efficiency rather than ease-of-use, and it will likely not completely replace OpenGL for some time, if ever. Metal, Direct3D, and Vulkan are not covered in this textbook. We are using OpenGL since it provides an easier introduction to 3D graphics and because it is still the basis for 3D graphics in Web browsers.
We have said that OpenGL is an API, but in fact it is a series of APIs that have been subject to repeated extension and revision. The current version, in 2021, is 4.6, which was first released in 2017, and it is very different from the 1.0 version from 1992. Furthermore, there is a specialized version called OpengGL ES for "embedded systems" such as mobile phones and tablets. And there is also WebGL, for use in Web browsers, which is basically a port of OpenGL ES. It will be useful to know something about how and why OpenGL has changed.
First of all, you should know that OpenGL was designed as a "client/server" system. The server, which is responsible for controlling the computer's display and performing graphics computations, carries out commands issued by the client. Typically, the server is a GPU, including its graphics processors and memory. The server executes OpenGL commands. The client is the CPU in the same computer, along with the application program that it is running. OpenGL commands come from the program that is running on the CPU. However, it is actually possible to run OpenGL programs remotely over a network. That is, you can execute an application program on a remote computer (the OpenGL client), while the graphics computations and display are done on the computer that you are actually using (the OpenGL server).
The key idea is that the client and the server are separate components, and there is a communication channel between those components. OpenGL commands and the data that they need are communicated from the client (the CPU) to the server (the GPU) over that channel. The capacity of the channel can be a limiting factor in graphics performance. Think of drawing an image onto the screen. If the GPU can draw the image in microseconds, but it takes milliseconds to send the data for the image from the CPU to the GPU, then the great speed of the GPU is irrelevant—most of the time that it takes to draw the image is communication time.
For this reason, one of the driving factors in the evolution of OpenGL has been the desire to limit the amount of communication that is needed between the CPU and the GPU. One approach is to store information in the GPU's memory. If some data is going to be used several times, it can be transmitted to the GPU once and stored in memory there, where it will be immediately accessible to the GPU. Another approach is to try to decrease the number of OpenGL commands that must be transmitted to the GPU to draw a given image.
OpenGL draws primitives such as triangles. Specifying a primitive means specifying coordinates and attributes for each of its vertices. In the original OpenGL 1.0, a separate command was used to specify the coordinates of each vertex, and a command was needed each time the value of an attribute changed. To draw a single triangle would require three or more commands. Drawing a complex object made up of thousands of triangles would take many thousands of commands. Even in OpenGL 1.1, it became possible to draw such an object with a single command instead of thousands. All the data for the object would be loaded into arrays, which could then be sent in a single step to the GPU. Unfortunately, if the object was going to be drawn more than once, then the data would have to be retransmitted each time the object was drawn. This was fixed in OpenGL 1.5 with Vertex Buffer Objects. A VBO is a block of memory in the GPU that can store the coordinates or attribute values for a set of vertices. This makes it possible to reuse the data without having to retransmit it from the CPU to the GPU every time it is used.
Similarly, OpenGL 1.1 introduced texture objects to make it possible to store several images on the GPU for use as textures. This means that texture images that are going to be reused several times can be loaded once into the GPU, so that the GPU can easily switch between images without having to reload them.
As new capabilities were added to OpenGL, the API grew in size. But the growth was still outpaced by the invention of new, more sophisticated techniques for doing graphics. Some of these new techniques were added to OpenGL, but the problem is that no matter how many features you add, there will always be demands for new features—as well as complaints that all the new features are making things too complicated! OpenGL was a giant machine, with new pieces always being tacked onto it, but still not pleasing everyone. The real solution was to make the machine programmable. With OpenGL 2.0, it became possible to write programs to be executed as part of the graphical computation in the GPU. The programs are run on the GPU at GPU speed. A programmer who wants to use a new graphics technique can write a program to implement the feature and just hand it to the GPU. The OpenGL API doesn't have to be changed. The only thing that the API has to support is the ability to send programs to the GPU for execution.
The programs are called shaders (although the term does't really describe what most of them actually do). The first shaders to be introduced were vertex shaders and fragment shaders. When a primitive is drawn, some work has to be done at each vertex of the primitive, such as applying a geometric transform to the vertex coodinates or using the attributes and global lighting environment to compute the color of that vertex. A vertex shader is a program that can take over the job of doing such "per-vertex" computations. Similarly, some work has to be done for each pixel inside the primitive. A fragment shader can take over the job of performing such "per-pixel" computations. (Fragment shaders are also called pixel shaders.)
The idea of programmable graphics hardware was very successful—so successful that in OpenGL 3.0, the usual per-vertex and per-fragment processing was deprecated (meaning that its use was discouraged). And in OpenGL 3.1, it was removed from the OpenGL standard, although it is still present as an optional extension. In practice, all the original features of OpenGL are still supported in desktop versions of OpenGL and will probably continue to be available in the future. On the embedded system side, however, with OpenGL ES 2.0 and later, the use of shaders is mandatory, and a large part of the OpenGL 1.1 API has been completely removed. WebGL, the version of OpenGL for use in web browsers, is based on OpenGL ES 2.0, and it also requires shaders to get anything at all done. Nevertheless, we will begin our study of OpenGL with version 1.1. Most of the concepts and many of the details from that version are still relevant, and it offers an easier entry point for someone new to 3D graphics programming.
OpenGL shaders are written in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language). Like OpenGL itself, GLSL has gone through several versions. We will spend some time later in the course studying GLSL ES, the version used with WebGL and OpenGL ES. GLSL uses a syntax similar to the C programming language.
As a final remark on GPU hardware, we should note that the computations that are done for different vertices are pretty much independent, and so can potentially be done in parallel. The same is true of the computations for different fragments. In fact, GPUs can have hundreds or thousands of processors that can operate in parallel. Admittedly, the individual processors are much less powerful than a CPU, but then typical per-vertex and per-fragment computations are not very complicated. The large number of processors, and the large amount of parallelism that is possible in graphics computations, makes for impressive graphics performance even on fairly inexpensive GPUs.