ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a slightly different route and blends the details of using graphics hardware with some of the practical issues associated with programming that hardware. It is designed to be an introductory guide to graphics hardware and could be used as the basis for a set of weekly labs that investigate graphics hardware. The chapter details about establishing a context but many windowing system development libraries have ways to query the graphics hardware for various capabilities and establish the graphics context based on those requirements. It presents hardware programming concepts and examples presents with OpenGL. The chapter explores the current OpenGL and OpenGL Shading Language specifications for additional details on what these application program interfaces and languages can support. It provides information on vertex and fragment shaders, but specialized geometry and compute shaders also exist in the current versions of OpenGL.
