Khronos OpenGL® and OpenGL® ES Reference Pages

OpenGL® and OpenGL® ES Reference Pages

Complete descriptions of API commands and shading language functions are provided for the current versions these APIs.

Current API Versions

Older API Versions

Note that each reference page in the Current Versions pages linked above includes version support information for older versions, so (for example) the OpenGL 3.x reference pages are no longer provided. The older OpenGL ES 3.x and 2.x pages linked here are increasingly out of date, and may eventually be removed.

The OpenGL 2.1 pages are the only source of reference material for GLX, GLU, and the OpenGL Compatibility Profile. They may be retained for that reason, even though they are otherwise useless, or we may eventually incorporate that material in the OpenGL 4.5 pages instead.

Reference Page Sources

The Docbook source for the reference pages is available from the OpenGL-Refpages github repository.

API Reference Cards

Quick Reference Cards are available in several formats for OpenGL 3.3 - 4.5 and OpenGL ES 2.0 - 3.2.

Formal Specifications for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES APIs and Shading Languages are available from the OpenGL Registry. These are the authoritative documents for how the APIs and Shading Languages are intended to work. They are also the most difficult to read, being written primarily for device driver implementers, not developers using OpenGL ES.

Books

OpenGL SuperBible - Definitive programmer's guide, tutorial, reference, and example code for OpenGL 4.5.

Libraries, Tools, and Tutorials

Khronos used to host "SDK" areas for OpenGL and OpenGL ES, primarily composed of links to external projects, with some hosted content on behalf of those projects. These areas were not kept up to date, and aside from a few Khronos-authored projects, have been retired. Projects formerly in the SDK which are still active are linked below.

Libraries

Equalizer - Middleware to create and deploy parallel OpenGL-based applications.

GLEW - The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library.

GLM (OpenGL Mathematics) - - A C++ mathematics library for graphics programming.

GLUS - A modern OpenGL, OpenGL ES and OpenVG Utility library.

Mesa 3D - An open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification.

Open Scene Graph - A high performance 3D graphics toolkit widely used in research and industry.

Tools

CodeXL - AMD tool suite for GPU debugging, profiling, and shader analysis.

KTX - lightweight file format for OpenGL textures, and libktx library for reading and writing KTX files.

GLIntercept - OpenGL function call intercept & logging tool.

GLSLang - OpenGL Shading Language Reference Compiler.

GLView - OpenGL Extensions Viewer.

NVIDIA Nsight Visual Studio (and other developer tools).

Tutorials

OpenGL Samples Pack - a collection of OpenGL sample code using the OpenGL core profile.

Copyright 2017-2021 The Khronos Group, Inc.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.