OpenGL Programming Guide

Appendix A
Order of Operations

This guide describes all the operations performed between the time vertices are specified and when fragments are finally written into the framebuffer. The chapters of this guide are arranged in an order that facilitates learning rather than in the exact order in which these operations are actually performed. Sometimes the exact order of operations doesn't matter - for example, surfaces can be converted to polygons and then transformed, or transformed first and then converted to polygons, with identical results - and different implementations of OpenGL might do things differently. This appendix describes a possible order; any implementation is required to give equivalent results. If you want more details than are presented here, see the OpenGL Reference Manual.

This appendix has the following major sections:

• "Overview"
  
  

• "Geometric Operations"
  
  

• "Pixel Operations"
  
  

• "Fragment Operations"
  
  

• "Odds and Ends"

Overview
Geometric Operations
Pixel Operations
Fragment Operations
Odds and Ends

OpenGL Programming Guide