This chapter provides an overview of OpenGL and the interfaces your application uses on the Mac platform to tap into it. Figure 1-1 OpenGL provides the reflections in iChat OS X provides a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that Cocoa applications can use to support OpenGL drawing. These frameworks use platform-neutral virtual resources to free your programming as much as possible from the underlying graphics hardware. OpenGL for OS X is implemented as a set of frameworks that contain the OpenGL runtime engine and its drawing software.

OpenGL is available to all Macintosh applications. The responsiveness of the windows, the instant results of applying an effect in iPhoto, and many other operations in OS X are due to the use of OpenGL. The reflections built into iChat ( Figure 1-1) provide one of the more notable examples. You can tell that Apple has an implementation of OpenGL on its platform by looking at the user interface for many of the applications that are installed with OS X. To create high-performance code on GPUs, use the Metal framework instead.