OpenGL On The Raspi

Perhaps we’ve been concentrating too much on the hardware side of the Raspberry Pi. Sure, connecting the Raspi to the outside world through GPIO pins is cool, but let’s not forget we’re dealing with a full-fledged Linux box here. [chris] is doing his best to keep us in check with by bringing the power of OpenGL graphics to the Raspberry Pi.

Previously, OpenGL ES was only available for xorg but [chris] successfully added support for Raspbian. There’s a great physics demo [chris] put together showing off 128 spheres and cubes bouncing around a plane.

Right now, [chris] is looking for people to contribute samples and tutorials for making accelerated 3D graphics on the Raspi. You can grab all the code over at [chris]’ Git and contact him over on the Raspberry Pi forums if you’d like to help out.

As with any graphics demo, check out the videos after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=884rHzIp9dU&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsQpn3Z3U-s&w=470]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuzdWwQyJbo&w=470]

8 thoughts on “OpenGL On The Raspi

  1. “Previously, OpenGL ES was only available for xorg but [chris] successfully added support for Raspbian.”

    This sentence doesn’t make any sense. You make it sound like xorg is a linux distribution.
    And is the support in OpenGL ES? I think you mean that Raspbian now supports ít.

  2. Actually, you don’t need anything to do OpenGL ES on the Raspberry Pi, you make it sound like you have to have a X server or a full fledged distro.

    You just need GCC and one library file, you can even run your OpenGL programs from SSH and have the display on the HDMI without any problem. And this is from day one with the default Debian distro.

    Don’t jump on any piece of news about the Raspberry Pi, please take the time to do some research.

    You sound like you don’t have one or don’t use it at all…

  3. I’ve just finished porting a tile engine to the Pi’s GLES implementation from standard OGL 2. Well it started out as OGL/GLES 2, but the shader performance is rather low (to be expected in a budget CPU), so I moved it back to fixed-function mode (nearly doubled the framerate). Overall the GPU seems to perform at about 80% of my Intel Atom’s GMA GPU, which isn’t too terrible.

    Creating an EGL/GLES context is a bit more difficult and “nonstandard” than you would expect, but it does have the flexibility of not needing X11 if you don’t want it.

    I am curious as to how recent the Raspbian support is, because I tried it about 2 weeks ago and not even the stock demos would run.

  4. just to be clear, because this article sadly isn’t i have NOT hacked in GLES or OpenGL suport for the PI it already has it!

    I have put together a framework to make using gles on the pi easier.

    i have also showed -by example- the pi can be used for real time dynamics

  5. It’s not clear from this article but I’d like to make it clear I did NOT bring GLES or OpenGL to the PI

    The framework is to ease development.

    I have also demonstrated – by example – using a dynamics library (such as OpenDE) and shown that the PI has sufficient power to make this practical

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