OpenGL Programming Guide

Chapter 10The Framebuffer

Buffers and Their Uses

Clearing Buffers

In graphics programs, clearing the screen (or any of the buffers) is typically one of the most expensive operations you can perform - on a 1280 by 1024 monitor, it requires touching well over a million pixels. For simple graphics applications, the clear operation can take more time than the rest of the drawing. If you need to clear not only the color buffer but also the depth and stencil buffers, say, the clear operation can be three times as expensive.

To address this problem, some machines have hardware that can clear more than one buffer at once. The OpenGL clearing commands are structured to take advantage of architectures like this. First, you specify the values to be written into each buffer to be cleared. Then you issue a single command to perform the clear operation, passing in a list of all the buffers to be cleared. If the hardware is capable of simultaneous clears, they all occur at once; otherwise, each buffer is cleared sequentially.

The following commands set the clearing values for each buffer. void glClearColor(GLclampf red, GLclampf green, GLclampf blue, GLclampf alpha);
void glClearIndex(GLfloat index);
void glClearDepth(GLclampd depth);
void glClearStencil(GLint s);
void glClearAccum(GLfloat red, GLfloat green, GLfloat blue, GLfloat alpha);

Specifies the current clearing values for the color buffer (in RGBA mode), the color buffer (in color-index mode), the depth buffer, the stencil buffer, and the accumulation buffer. The GLclampf and GLclampd types (clamped GLfloat and clamped GLdouble) are clamped to be between 0.0 and 1.0. The default depth-clearing value is 1.0; all the other default clearing values are 0. The values set with the clear commands remain in effect until they're changed by another call to the same command.

After you've selected your clearing values and you're ready to clear the buffers, use glClear(). void glClear(GLbitfield mask);

Clears the specifed buffers. The value of mask is the bitwise logical OR of some combination of GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT, GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT, GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT, and GL_ACCUM_BUFFER_BIT, to identify which buffers are to be cleared. GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT clears either the RGBA color or the color-index buffer, depending on the mode of the system at the time. When you clear the color or color-index buffer, all the color buffers that are enabled for writing (see the next section) are cleared.

OpenGL Programming Guide