OpenGL Terminology
Confused with all the OpenGL terminology? I decided to help you out by compiling the most important OpenGL terminology worth knowing.
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OpenGL Buffers
Definition: An OpenGL Buffer is a linear block of untyped data. Think of it as generic memory allocations.
OpenGL Textures
Definition: A Texture is a data storage used to store multi-dimensional data, such as images.
OpenGL Samplers
Definition: A representation of a texture and sampling parameters in a shader.
Sampler Objects
Definition: A Sampler Object stores the wrapping & filtering parameters that control a texture.
Texture Unit
Definition: A Texture Unit contains a texture object & a sampler object.
Texture Object
Definition: A Texture Object contains data representing a texture.
Vertex Attribute
Definition: A Vertex Attribute is an input variable to a vertex shader.
Uniforms
Definition: A Uniform allows data to pass directly from your application to any shader stage.
Vertex Shader
Definition: A vertex shader computes & passes forward the coordinates of a model to the tessellation, geometry and fragment shader.
Fragment Shader
Definition: A Fragment Shader takes the output of the rasterizer and computes the color of the pixel for each fragment.
Tessellation Shader
Definition: A Tessellation Shader is capable of creating new geometry from existing geometry topology.
Geometry Shader
Definition: A Geometry Shader is capable of creating new geometry topology.
Texture Filtering
Definition: Texture Filtering is the process of calculating color fragments from a stretched or shrunken texture map.
OpenGL Targets
Definition: A Target determines the type of an OpenGL Object. Just like int or float determines the memory allocated for a variable in C++. A target determines the behavior of an OpenGL object.