Foreword
When OpenGL was young, the highest-end SGI systems like the Reality Engine 2 cost $80,000 and could render 200,000 textured triangles per second, or 3,333 triangles per frame at 60 Hz. The CPUs of that era were slower than today, to be sure, but at around 100 MHz, that’s still 500 CPU cycles for each triangle. It was pretty easy to be graphics limited back then, and the API reflected that—the only way to specify geometry was immediate mode! Well, there were also display lists for static geometry, which made being graphics-limited even easier.
OpenGL is not young anymore, the highest-end GPUs that it can run on cost around $1000, and they don’t even list triangles per second in their basic product description anymore, but the number is ...
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