When I tried the samples in the book, however, I was having a lot of difficulty getting it working on my linux-based mobile device. In implementing offscreen rendering for OpenGL ES, I turned to the very good OpenGL ES Programming book as it has a whole chapter on framebuffer objects. Compound this with the fact that many mobile games have simple gameplay/small screens that do not need such complex lighting models, many people now use off the shelf engines for their games, and that there is still a good amount of mobile hardware out there that doesn’t even support render to offscreen surfaces, and it is no surprise that few people use the technique and it’s not well discussed. OpenGL ES is often used on embedded/mobile devices, and until recently, these devices haven’t typically had the graphics bandwidth to keep up with new rendering techniques. Unfortunately, implementing offscreen rendering on OpenGL ES is not well documented. Post-processing effects, deferred rendering, and newer global illumination strategies all use it.
Rendering to offscreen surfaces is a key component to any graphics pipeline.
