Summary

This chapter aimed (and hopefully succeeded) to introduce you to a beautiful hardware-accelerated world of low-level OpenGL and GLSL development filled with vertices, indices, and shaders.

Direct programming of the GPU is an insanely powerful concept, and with this power always comes responsibility. Shaders are much harder to grasp than regular Python code; debugging might involve a fair measure of guesswork, and there is no convenient interactive environment, such as Python's REPL, to speak of. That said, there is no clear heuristic whether writing a raw GLSL would be useful for any particular application—it should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Examples in this chapter were deliberately simple to serve as a gentle learning experience, not a test of cognitive abilities. This is mainly because GLSL programming is a very non-trivial, convoluted subject to study, with numerous books and online tutorials dedicated to mastering it, and this short chapter is by no means a comprehensive...