Appendix C. Performance

OpenGL^® Distilled intentionally doesn't cover inherently inefficient OpenGL techniques. If you've followed the directions in this book, you're already using display lists, vertex arrays, primitives that share vertices, buffer objects, and texture objects, and you're not using the glBegin()/glEnd() paradigm. As a result, your application should avoid most OpenGL performance pitfalls.

Nonetheless, most professional developers profile their code and optimize it for maximum performance. This is especially important for applications that need to maintain smooth frame rates.

Before tuning, be familiar with the capabilities of your graphics card and computer system so that you'll know what performance to expect.