OpenGL.org

The Industry's Foundation for High Performance Graphics

from games to virtual reality, mobile phones to supercomputers

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There are numerous Windowing system and interface libraries available for OpenGL as well as Scengraphs and High-level libraries build on top of OpenGL

  • About GLUT
    • GLUT is the OpenGL Utility Toolkit, a window system independent toolkit for writing OpenGL programs. It implements a simple windowing application programming interface (API) for OpenGL. GLUT makes it considerably easier to learn about and explore OpenGL Programming.
  • Other GLUT-like Window System Toolkits
    • Libraries that are modeled on the functionality of GLUT providing support for things like: windowing and events, user input, menuing, full screen rendering, performance timing
  • About GLX, GLU & DRI
    • GLX is used on Unix OpenGL implementation to manage interaction with the X Window System and to encode OpenGL onto the X protocol stream for remote rendering. GLU is the OpenGL Utility Library. This is a set of functions to create texture mipmaps from a base image, map coordinates between screen and object space, and draw quadric surfaces and NURBS. DRI is the Direct Rendering Infrastructure for coordinating the Linux kernel, X window system, 3D graphics hardware and an OpenGL-based rendering engine.
    • GLX, GLU and DRI

      GLXLibrary

      GLX 1.3 is used on Unix OpenGL implementation to manage interaction with the X Window System and to encode OpenGL onto the X protocol stream for remote rendering. It supports: pixel buffers for hardware accelerated offscreen rendering; read-only drawables for preprocessing of data in an offscreen window and direct video input; and FBConfigs, a more powerful and flexible interface for selecting frame buffer configurations underlying an OpenGL rendering window.

      GLU Library

      GLU is the OpenGL Utility Library. This is a set of functions to create texture mipmaps from a base image, map coordinates between screen and object space, and draw quadric surfaces and NURBS. GLU 1.2 is the version of GLU that goes with OpenGL 1.1.
      GLU 1.3 is available and includes new capabilities corresponding to new OpenGL 1.2 features.

      Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI)

      In simple terms, the DRI enables hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on Linux. More specifically, it's a software architecture for coordinating the Linux kernel, X window system, 3D graphics hardware and an OpenGL-based rendering engine.

  • Higher Level Libraries built on OpenGL
    • Leading software developers use OpenGL, with its robust rendering libraries, as the 2D/3D graphics foundation for higher-level APIs. Developers leverage the capabilities of OpenGL to deliver highly differentiated, yet widely supported vertical market solutions. Open Inventor, IRIS Performer, OpenGL Optimizer, OpenGL Volumizer, OpenGL Shader, Scene Graph APIs.
    • Open Inventor® by VSG
      • Open Inventor® by VSG is the commercial, current evolution of Open Inventor and provides an up-to-date, highly-optimized, full-featured implementation of the popular object-oriented scenegraph API for C++, .NET and Java. Applications powered by Open Inventor by VSG also benefit from powerful extensions such as VolumeViz LDM for very large volume data, MeshViz XLM for high-performance mesh support, or ScaleViz for multi-GPUs and immersive VR.
    • OpenSceneGraph
      • OSG is a open source high peformance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling. €Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, OSX, Linux, IRIX, Solaris and FreeBSD operating systems.
    • Quesa3D
      • Quesa is a high level 3D graphics library, released as Open Source under the LGPL, which implements Apple's QuickDraw 3D API on top of OpenGL. It supports both retained and immediate mode rendering, an extensible file format, plug-in renderers, a wide range of high level geometries, hierarchical models, and a consistent and object-orientated API. Quesa currently supports Mac OS, Linux, and Windows - ports to Be and Mac OS X are in progress.
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