Learning OpenGL

[JasonX]

[Baker]

[mh]

Mine doesn't vary.

One thing though that I will say is that the NeHe tutorials are really old-hat nowadays. You see, when you say "OpenGL" these days there are a number of different APIs you might be referring to.

There's classic OpenGL (1.0 to 1.4ish I would say) which is pre-hardware T&L, fixed functionality, focus on immediate mode, etc. OpenGL 1.5 is a slight oddity and an intermediate stage so I'll skip that.

I'd lump OpenGL 2.0 and 2.1 together (as well as with more modern versions using a compatibility context); here we're talking about shaders and VBOs as the primary rendering interface you'll use; hardware T&L now exists so a lot of the OpenGL philosophy of "don't sweat the hardware details, trust the driver to do the right thing" is no longer relevant and often downright dangerous.

Modern OpenGL is 3.x and 4.x in a core context; a lot of stuff is deprecated, you're now required to use shaders and VBOs everywhere, the matrix stack is gone, and so on.

OpenGL ES also exists in 2 flavours, and the main differentiating feature seems to be whether or not shaders are available.

So based on this you can see that one chunk of OpenGL code will often look nothing like another chunk, depending on which version each targets.

Back to NeHe - that's primarily what I've called "classic OpenGL" up above. It's fine for simple basic stuff, but it's not going to perform well at all on modern hardware. It's also completely different to the more modern API so anything you learn from it is not only going to be irrelevant, but it may get you into bad habits.

So take your pick really; depending on what you want to do with your code.

[metlslime]

[mh]

[metlslime]

Okay, that's what I thought you meant but i couldn't tell for sure... so if you want to run on really old hardware, keep using 1.x (and if you achieve acceptable performance on that old hardware, it will be acceptable on the new stuff too.)

If you target newer hardware and want to push the envelope, abandon 1.x at all costs.

[mh]

[Spike]

[mh]

[metalmodman]

[Spirit]

[mh]