Modern OpenGL

OpenGL was conceived in 1991 to provide an industry standard for programming the hardware graphics pipeline. The original design has evolved considerably over the last 17 years. Whereas capabilities mandated by OpenGL such as texture mapping and a stencil buffer were present only on the world's most expensive graphics hardware back in 1991, now these features are completely pervasive in PCs and now even available in several hand-held devices. Over that time, OpenGL's original fixed-function state machine has evolved into a complex data-flow including several application-programmable stages. And the performance of OpenGL has increased from 100x to over 1,000x in many important raw graphics operations.