A Quick OpenGL Tutorial

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Welcome to my OpenGL tutorial! Recently, with the appearance of high-performance 3D graphics cards on the PC, 3D applications are no longer delegated to the realm of the expensive custom workstation. For a C programmer, this means more than games – 3D is already being used in hundreds of application areas which previously were somewhat… flat.

The de-facto standard for a 3D api for many years was OpenGL, originally made by SGI. Unfortunetly, when it came time to port OGL over to the PC platform to take advantage of the new accelerated graphics cards, Microsoft was hard at work at it's own 3D standard-Direct3D. The result was that MS dragged its feet somewhat and released a somewhat shoddy software-only port of OpenGL on Windows 95. SGI also released a software-only version which takes advantage of acceleration techniques such as the MMX instruction set, and many card manufactures (such as those that use the 3Dfx chipset) provide their own drivers for interfacing with their boards. Unfortunetly, Microsoft has made it clear by their actions that Direct3D will be the only api they will support for Windows 95 (and the upcoming Windows 98).

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