Chapter 9Advanced Buffers: Beyond the Basics

by Nicholas Haemel

What You’ll Learn in this Chapter:

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By now framebuffer objects are old hat. We can use the flexibility provided by FBOs, textures, and buffer objects to really push the OpenGL pipeline. So far most of our work has been with traditional 8-bit color textures and renderbuffers. Even depth buffers mapped all values to 24 or 32 bits of physical fixed-point range.

New data formats open a whole new world, allowing your application to store the actual output of the fragment shader without loss of precision. The fun doesn’t stop there. OpenGL also provides many ways of accessing and updating ...

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