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An OpenGL display is an area of a screen managed by OpenGL libraries and drivers, which can be full screen or within a window. It is a rectangular Cartesian grid with specific attributes used during the rasterization process. The display is tied to a buffer in memory and rendered before being copied to the screen. It is abstract for programmers, with functions that can produce different results on different hardware. Despite varying quality, it is beneficial to output to any display device.
In computer graphics programming, an Open Graphics Library® (OpenGL®) display is an area of a monitor or other display device that is fully or partially managed by OpenGL® libraries and drivers. An OpenGL® display can be a full screen, known as full screen mode, or it can be just the area within a window within a graphical user interface (GUI) or a small panel embedded in a layout largest, when the largest layout is not handled by OpenGL®. Some operating systems and computer configurations use OpenGL® as the default method for drawing on a screen, which means that technically everything shown on the monitor is contained in an OpenGL® display.
Most end users don’t distinguish between what is and isn’t an OpenGL® display, because this kind of technical aspect is usually transparent in most software. From a computer graphics programming perspective, however, an OpenGL® display must be a known quantity created with specific attributes such as size, color depth, and other properties. The display itself is basically a rectangular Cartesian grid which refers to the rectangular area of the physical screen on which it will appear. Graphics hardware and OpenGL® drivers both use OpenGL® display attributes during the rasterization process, which involves transforming mathematically defined three-dimensional (3D) objects into two-dimensional (2D) pixels placed on the display surface.
In general, an OpenGL® display is usually not drawn directly onto a visible screen, mainly because it creates visual artifacts and tearing on the screen. Instead, the display is tied to a specific location in memory, called a buffer, to which it is drawn by OpenGL® drawing commands. Once the image to be displayed is rendered, it is copied to the display so that it appears on screen as quickly as possible.
To some extent, using the OpenGL® display is abstract for programmers. As with many aspects of OpenGL®, there are functions that can define, draw, and otherwise manipulate the display, but they can produce different results on different types of hardware. For example, some configurations will attempt to automatically scale a display to fit a given area, regardless of the number of pixels contained in the target rectangle, potentially reducing the quality of the rendered frame. Even with the issue of varying quality, however, in most cases it’s still beneficial to have the ability to output to any type of display device, whether it’s a cell phone, a digital projector, or a headset for virtual reality.
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