How to run opengl on mac

The specification for OpenGL is controlled by the Khronos Group, an industry consortium whose members include many of the major companies in the computer graphics industry, including Apple. OpenGL provides functions your application uses to generate 2D or 3D images. Your application presents the rendered images to the screen or copies them back to its own memory. The OpenGL specification does not provide a windowing layer of its own. Your application creates an OS X OpenGL rendering context and attaches a rendering target to it known as a drawable object.

The drawable object is the final destination for OpenGL drawing commands and is typically associated with a Cocoa window or view.

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Depending on whether your application intends to draw OpenGL content to a window, to draw to the entire screen, or to perform offscreen image processing, it takes different steps to create the rendering context and associate it with a drawable object. Macs support different types of graphics processors, each with different rendering capabilities, supporting versions of OpenGL from 1. When creating a rendering context, your application can accept a broad range of renderers or it can restrict itself to devices with specific capabilities.

Once you have a context, you can configure how that context executes OpenGL commands. OpenGL on the Mac is not only a heterogenous environment, but it is also a dynamic environment. Users can add or remove displays, or take a laptop running on battery power and plug it into a wall. When the graphics environment on the Mac changes, the renderer associated with the context may change. Your application must handle these changes and adjust how it uses OpenGL.

Graphics processors are massively parallelized devices optimized for graphics operations. To access that computing power adds additional overhead because data must move from your application to the GPU over slower internal buses. Accessing the same data simultaneously from both your application and OpenGL is usually restricted. To get great performance in your application, you must carefully design your application to feed data and commands to OpenGL so that the graphics hardware runs in parallel with your application.

Many Macs ship with multiple processors or multiple cores, and future hardware is expected to add more of each. Designing applications to take advantage of multiprocessing is critical. OpenGL places additional restrictions on multithreaded applications. If you intend to add concurrency to an OpenGL application, you must ensure that the application does not access the same context from two different threads at the same time.

Higher resolution textures, detailed models, and more complex lighting and shading algorithms can improve image quality. You can tell that Apple has an implementation of OpenGL on its platform by looking at the user interface for many of the applications that are installed with OS X. The reflections built into iChat Figure provide one of the more notable examples.

The responsiveness of the windows, the instant results of applying an effect in iPhoto, and many other operations in OS X are due to the use of OpenGL. OpenGL is available to all Macintosh applications. These frameworks use platform-neutral virtual resources to free your programming as much as possible from the underlying graphics hardware.

This chapter provides an overview of OpenGL and the interfaces your application uses on the Mac platform to tap into it. OpenGL uses a client-server model, as shown in Figure The client delivers drawing commands to an OpenGL server. The nature of the client, the server, and the communication path between them is specific to each implementation of OpenGL. For example, the server and clients could be on different computers, or they could be different processes on the same computer. A client-server model allows the graphics workload to be divided between the client and the server.

For example, all Macintosh computers ship with dedicated graphics hardware that is optimized to perform graphics calculations in parallel. A benefit of the OpenGL client-server model is that the client can return control to the application before the command has finished executing. If OpenGL required all commands to complete before returning control to the application, then either the CPU or the GPU would be idle waiting for the other to provide it data, resulting in reduced performance.

Some OpenGL commands implicitly or explicitly require the client to wait until some or all previously submitted commands have completed. OpenGL applications should be designed to reduce the frequency of client-server synchronizations. When an application calls an OpenGL function, the OpenGL client copies any data provided in the parameters before returning control to the application. For example, if a parameter points at an array of vertex data stored in application memory, OpenGL must copy that data before returning. Therefore, an application is free to change memory it owns regardless of calls it makes to OpenGL.

The data that the client copies is often reformatted before it is transmitted to the server. Copying, modifying, and transmitting parameters to the server adds overhead to calling OpenGL. Applications should be designed to minimize copy overhead. Instead, OpenGL expects each implementation to define an interface to create rendering contexts and associate them with the graphics subsystem. A rendering context holds all of the data stored in the OpenGL state machine. Allowing multiple contexts allows the state in one machine to be changed by an application without affecting other contexts.

Associating OpenGL with the graphic subsystem usually means allowing OpenGL content to be rendered to a specific window. When content is associated with a window, the implementation creates whatever resources are required to allow OpenGL to render and display images. The framework and driver combine to implement the client portion of OpenGL, as shown in Figure Dedicated graphics hardware provides the server.

Although this is the common scenario, Apple also provides a software renderer implemented entirely on the CPU. OS X supports a display space that can include multiple dissimilar displays, each driven by different graphics cards with different capabilities.

In addition, multiple OpenGL renderers can drive each graphics card. This segmentation allows for plug-in interfaces to both the window system layer and the framework layer. Plug-in interfaces offer flexibility in software and hardware configuration without violating the OpenGL standard. The common OpenGL framework layer is the software interface to the graphics hardware. This layer contains Apple's implementation of the OpenGL specification.

The driver layer contains the optional GLD plug-in interface and one or more GLD plug-in drivers, which may have different software and hardware support capabilities. The GLD plug-in interface supports third-party plug-in drivers, allowing third-party hardware vendors to provide drivers optimized to take best advantage of their graphics hardware.

The programming interfaces that your application calls fall into two categories—those specific to the Macintosh platform and those defined by the OpenGL Working Group. The Apple-specific programming interfaces are what Cocoa applications use to communicate with the OS X windowing system. These APIs don't create OpenGL content, they manage content, direct it to a drawing destination, and control various aspects of the rendering operation.

OpenGL routines accept vertex, pixel, and texture data and assemble the data to create an image. The final image resides in a framebuffer, which is presented to the user through the windowing-system specific API. CGL offers the most direct access to system functionality and provides the highest level of graphics performance and control for drawing to the full screen.

OS X also provides the full suite of graphics libraries that are part of every implementation of OpenGL: It supports the core functions defined by the OpenGL specification. It provides support for two fundamental types of graphics primitives: The GL API does not handle complex custom graphical objects; your application must decompose them into simpler geometries. It runs on all conforming implementations of OpenGL.

OpenGL on the Mac Platform

GLU is capable of creating and handling complex polygons including quartic equations , processing nonuniform rational b-spline curves NURBs , scaling images, and decomposing a surface to a series of polygons tessellation. The GLUT library provides a cross-platform API for performing operations associated with the user windowing environment—displaying and redrawing content, handling events, and so on. Code that you write with GLUT can be reused across multiple platforms. However, such code is constrained by a generic set of user interface elements and event-handling options.

This document does not show how to use GLUT. X11 for OS X is available as an optional installation. It's not shown in Figure This document does not show how to use these libraries. For detailed information, either go to the OpenGL Foundation website http: As an OpenGL programmer, some of these may seem familiar to you. However, understanding the Apple-specific nuances of these terms will help you get the most out of OpenGL on the Macintosh platform.

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The characteristics of the final image depend on the capabilities of the graphics hardware associated with the renderer and the device used to display the image. OS X supports graphics accelerator cards with varying capabilities, as well as a software renderer. It is possible for multiple renderers, each with different capabilities or features, to drive a single set of graphics hardware. Your application uses renderer and buffer attributes to communicate renderer and buffer requirements to OpenGL.

OpenGL Programming/Installation/Mac

The Apple implementation of OpenGL dynamically selects the best renderer for the current rendering task and does so transparently to your application. If your application has very specific rendering requirements and wants to control renderer selection, it can do so by supplying the appropriate renderer attributes. Buffer attributes describe such things as color and depth buffer sizes, and whether the data is stereoscopic or monoscopic.

OpenGL uses the attributes you supply to perform the setup work needed prior to drawing content. Drawing to a Window or View provides a simple example that shows how to use renderer and buffer attributes. Choosing Renderer and Buffer Attributes explains how to choose renderer and buffer attributes to achieve specific rendering goals. A pixel format describes the format for pixel data storage in memory. The description includes the number and order of components as well as their names typically red, blue, green and alpha.

It also includes other information, such as whether a pixel contains stencil and depth values. A pixel format object is an opaque data structure that holds a pixel format along with a list of renderers and display devices that satisfy the requirements specified by an application. Each of the Apple-specific OpenGL APIs defines a pixel format data type and accessor routines that you can use to obtain the information referenced by this object. See Virtual Screens for more information on renderer and display devices.

When your application provides an OpenGL profile as part of its renderer attributes, it only receives renderers that provide the complete feature set promised by that profile. The render can implement a different version of the OpenGL so long as the version it supplies to your application provides the same functionality that your application requested.

A rendering context , or simply context , contains OpenGL state information and objects for your application. State variables include such things as drawing color, the viewing and projection transformations, lighting characteristics, and material properties.

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• OpenGL Programming Guide for Mac.

State variables are set per context. When your application creates OpenGL objects for example, textures , these are also associated with the rendering context.

Although your application can maintain more than one context, only one context can be the current context in a thread. The current context is the rendering context that receives OpenGL commands issued by your application. A drawable object refers to an object allocated by the windowing system that can serve as an OpenGL framebuffer. A drawable object is the destination for OpenGL drawing operations. The behavior of drawable objects is not part of the OpenGL specification, but is defined by the OS X windowing system.

A drawable object can be any of the following: Before OpenGL can draw to a drawable object, the object must be attached to a rendering context.

The characteristics of the drawable object narrow the selection of hardware and software specified by the rendering context. The logical flow of data from an application through OpenGL to a drawable object is shown in Figure The application issues OpenGL commands that are sent to the current rendering context. The current context, which contains state information, constrains how the commands are interpreted by the appropriate renderer.

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The renderer converts the OpenGL primitives to an image in the framebuffer. The characteristics and quality of the OpenGL content that the user sees depend on both the renderer and the physical display used to view the content. The combination of renderer and physical display is called a virtual screen.

A simple system, with one graphics card and one physical display, typically has two virtual screens. One virtual screen consists of a hardware-based renderer and the physical display and the other virtual screen consists of a software-based renderer and the physical display.