OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

OpenGL Drawing Commands

Most OpenGL drawing commands start with the word Draw.⁷ The drawing commands are roughly broken into two subsets—indexed and nonindexed draws. Indexed draws use an array of indices stored in a buffer object bound to the GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER binding that is used to indirectly index into the enabled vertex arrays. On the other hand, nonindexed draws do not use the GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER at all, and simply read the vertex data sequentially. The most basic, nonindexed drawing command in OpenGL is glDrawArrays().

7. In fact, the only two commands in OpenGL that start with Draw but don’t draw anything are glDrawBuffer() and glDrawBuffers().

void glDrawArrays(GLenum mode, GLint first, GLsizei count);

Constructs a sequence ...