The OpenGL Extensions Guide (Graphics Series) (Hardcover)

by Eric Lengyel (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
OpenGL is the premier environment for developing 2D and 3D graphics and game applications. The interface has been the choice of game programmers, primarily because of its cross-platform operability, but also, because it is constantly evolving to keep pace with hardware advances in the form of extensions. Until now, the game industry was lacking one single, concise reference to help make sense of the dozens of extensions available.

The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides a valuable resource that concentrates specifically on the extensions most important to developing modern 3D games. The book describes extensions in groups that modify or augment similar components of the base OpenGL architecture.

Key Features:
* Discusses all of the essential OpenGL extensions in detail and provides an invaluable reference tool to the OpenGL programmer
* Each extension is divided into a discussion section and one or two reference sections named "New Functions" and "Extended Functions." The "New Functions" section provides a detailed description of the new functions defined by an extension, and the "Extended Functions" section describes how existing OpenGL functions are augmented or modified by the extension
* Concentrates on practical usage of extensions and discusses underlying mathematical details only where necessary
* Discusses extensions sanctioned by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board), multi-vendor extensions, and vendor-specific extensions developed by Nvidia Corporation and ATI Technologies, Inc.

About the Author
Eric Lengyel (Sunnyvale, CA), best-selling author of Mathematics for 3D Game Programming and Computer Graphics, is the Chief Technology Officer for the game engine development studio, Terathon Software. He holds an M.S. in Mathematics from Virginia Tech and has written several articles for gamasutra.com and the Game Programming Gems series.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 670 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (July 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584502940
• ISBN-13: 978-1584502944
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,051,461 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, but slightly disappointing, September 29, 2003

By	Dave Astle (GameDev.net) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've often been frustrated by the fact that it's often hard to find good documentation for OpenGL extensions. The information in the extension registry, as well as in the latest OpenGL spec (for extensions that have been promoted to the core) is generally intended for OpenGL implementers, not OpenGL developers, so there usually isn't much about how or why you would use the extension. Sometimes, you can find papers and demos from one of the hardware vendors, such as Nvidia or ATI, but more often than not, you're left figuring it out on your own.

So when I heard about this book, I was really looking forward to it. Given the high quality of the author's other works, I expected it to immediately take a place on my desk.

This book is essentially an expansion of the information contained in the extension registry. It's considerably more user-friendly, the explanations are more detailed, and it conveniently groups the extensions by their functional area. However, it really doesn't discuss how or why you would use each extension in a game or graphics application. Nor does it include any demos, or even sample code. These factors keep the book from being as useful as it could have been.

Overall, this is a good book, and it provides a great reference for the extensions it covers, but it could have gone farther with showing you how to use them.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful reference, but incomplete and becoming outdated, February 1, 2005

By	David Elder "elddm" (Boston, Ma United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides a comprehensive reference for the main OpenGL extensions in use circa 2003. The extensions covered enable OpenGL support for features like new blending modes, texture environments, a variety of texture formats, fragment shading, pixel formats, point parameters, and assembly language vertex and fragment programs. The book devotes a chapter to each extension covered, and discusses the new functions, enums, constants, and general functionality provided by each extension. For several extensions, usage scenarios and example code are provides. By far the most useful chapters are the ones covering vertex and fragment programs, as the book provides a complete reference for the assembly languages and the OpenGL mechanisms for loading programs, setting attributes and parameters, etc. The program dialects covered are ARB vertex and fragment programs, as well as some proprietary NVIDIA versions.

For all its strengths, this book does have some flaws. First, the book is useful only if you already know, in general terms, what a particular extension does and you have a specific need for that functionality in your program. The book does not really give a general overview of the extensions, nor does it provide typical usage scenarios and sample code in all cases. In other words, the book is strictly a reference, since it provides very little introductory or tutorial material.

Second, the book is already getting out-of-date. There are a number of extensions that, in early 2005, are becoming widely used. These include:

Multiple Render Targets: The GL_ARB_draw_buffers and GL_ATI_draw_buffers extensions provide the ability to write color output to multiple buffers in a single rendering pass from a fragment program.

Non-power-of-two textures: The GL_ARB_non_power_of_two extension relaxes the requirement that OpenGL textures have power-of-two dimensions. It also provides more reasonable behavior in terms of texture coordinates and coordinate wrap modes than the GL_NV_texture_rectangle extension, which is discussed. Also, GL_NV_texture_rectangle has been supplanted by GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which is not discussed.

OpenGL shading language: This is the wave of the future. OpenGL 2.0 provides a high-level programming language for writing vertex and fragment programs, and its functionality is exposed through several extensions. Of course, this wasn't available in 2003.

Vertex and pixel buffer objects: The GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object extensions allow the programmer to create vertex and pixel buffers in high-performance video memory (managed by the driver) and do things like copy a pixel buffer into a vertex buffer. This allows you to do things like render new vertex positions into a pixel buffer, and then use the pixel values as the vertex input in a subsequent rendering pass.

The verdict: The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides comprehensive material about a wide range of extensions in use in 2003. It has virtually no tutorial material and several of the extension covered in this book are becoming obsolete. Also, several important new extensions are not covered. Hopefully a new edition will cover more relevant material, although this is obviously a moving target.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference!, September 28, 2003

By A Customer

Finally! this book is a long overdue alternative to reading the raw extension specs on opengl.org. It covers all of the extensions I've ever needed, and a few more that I didn't even know existed. The only thing I can complain about is that is doesn't have anything on pbuffers, but don't get me wrong, this book is nice and meaty and is a great resource for opengl programmers. Definitely recommended!