Transferring processing from the CPU to the GPU

OpenGL pre-dates modern graphics cards as we know them now. It was originally built to work with render farms, which were mostly superseded by modern-day graphics cards. As such, it underwent an API redesign in 2008 with the release of version 3.0, which focused on GPU programming.

You might now be wondering whether what you’ve learned thus far in this book is suddenly out of date! The answer is no. The mathematics is always relevant—it never changes. Up until now, you’ve received a gentle introduction to graphics programming. From here on, it gets more challenging.

If you think about it, the transforms that we’ve performed on an object move the object as a whole, but the equations for the transforms move each vertex individually. It’s just the nature of affine transformations. As discussed in Chapter 12, Mastering Affine Transformations, this means that moving an object is the same as transforming...