The first place to start for OpenGL documentation on the various mobile platforms is straight at the source:
Google’s Android documentation has a small amount of info about OpenGL, though not too much. You’ll get an overview of the APIs and learn how to exclude your application from unsupported devices. According to the OpenGL Dashboard, most devices out there now support OpenGL ES 2.0.
Apple’s OpenGL documentation is much better and goes into a lot more depth and detail. At their OpenGL ES for iOS website, you can learn more about best practices and the specifics of using OpenGL on their platform, and they also have videos and sample projects to download.
It’s also worth checking out what the various GPU vendors have to say about best practices and guidelines:
NVIDIA had a guide on optimizing OpenGL ES 2.0 performance for Tegra. With this guide, you’ll learn how to make your OpenGL code go faster, as well as some of the pitfalls to avoid. Much of the advice given here also makes a lot of sense on other GPUs, and can be measured against other techniques to see what works better.
Imagination Technologies also has a set of OpenGL ES 2.0 recommendations and an architecture guide tailored for the POWERVR SGX line of GPUs, and a performance recommendations document that seems to be a bit more recent. This line of GPUs is used on Apple’s recent iPhones and iPads, and they can also be found on many Android devices as well.
Each GPU vendor also often provides their own SDKs, tools, and IDEs for developing on their GPUs, which can help a great deal with tracing and finding performance issues.
I’m happy to announce that my book, OpenGL ES 2 for Android: A Quick-Start Guide, is now being readied to be sent off to the printers! I owe a special thanks to the publishers, to you guys, my readers and reviewers, and I also owe a special thanks to Mario Zechner, the creator of libgdx, […]
Some of you have been curious about what the air hockey game from the book would be like if we brought it over to other platforms. I would like to find out, myself. In the spirit of my last post about cross-platform development, I want to port the air hockey project over to a native […]
I’ve recently been spending time travelling overseas, taking a bit of a break after reaching an important milestone with the book, and also taking a bit of a rest from working for myself! The trip has been good so far, and I’ve even been keeping up to date with items from the RSS feed. Here […]
Are you looking to make a live wallpaper for Android? Wondering how to use OpenGL from a wallpaper service? Mark Guerra and some other contributors have kindly made their work available on GitHub, at https://github.com/GLWallpaperService/GLWallpaperService. This repository includes an OpenGL wallpaper service as well as several samples that show you how to use the service. Yours […]
Starting from today, Learn OpenGL ES now has a new community section of the site with a new set of forums! [Edit: Due to some technical issues and low usage, I have disabled the forums until further notice. I would still like to have a forums section in the future, so they can come back […]
Hi all, After nearly a year of working with the great team over at The Pragmatic Bookshelf, I am happy to announce that OpenGL ES for Android: A Quick-Start Guide is now in beta! OpenGL ES for Android: A Quick-Start Guide follows in the tradition of this website and goes into more detail, teaching you how […]
Welcome to another community round-up! A lot of people have been busy, creating great games, tutorials, and live wallpapers. Check them out below (in alphabetical order): Advancing Usability How to use the new OpenGL features of Qt5 Ino Pizza Snake Free pleyasLab Dolphins Real 3D Gaia 3D HD Free Rene van der Lende Kube — a tutorial […]
It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to showcase another great set of apps and posts from the community. First up, we have… Wubbly Bubble Live Wallpaper This interesting and lively live wallpaper renders a deforming 3D bubble to your home screen, with five different themes, many options for customization, and it runs on a […]
I often get questions related to OpenGL’s matrices: how do they work, how do they get built, and so forth. This is a topic that I have been frequently confused by, myself, and I feel that it warrants further explanation. To better understand OpenGL’s matrices, and how and why we use them, we first need […]
Learn how to develop mobile graphics using OpenGL ES 2