ABSTRACT
In your fi rst course in computer graphics, you probably used a graphics API to help you create your projects. Because this book focuses on graphics using OpenGL, we assume that your API was OpenGL, and in this chapter we review the graphics pipeline as it is expressed in OpenGL versions 1.x. If you used a diff erent API, especially in a fi rst graphics course, your experience was probably very close to the OpenGL approach. These APIs used a fi xed-function pipeline, or a pipeline with a fi xed set of operations on vertices and fragments. In the rest of this book, we will look at the shader capabilities of OpenGL versions 2.x and how you can use them to create eff ects that are diffi cult or impossible with the fi xed-function pipeline.
