PrimitiveGL

A lightweight OpenGL 3D engine for legacy and low-end hardware, focused on simplicity, portability and performance.

Current target

• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
• Intel x86 / x86_64
• Legacy OpenGL fixed-function pipeline
• System OpenGL, GLUT, ApplicationServices and IOKit frameworks
• GCC / Xcode toolchain
• No third-party dependencies for the basic renderer

Build

chmod +x build.sh
./build.sh

The binary is written to:

Build/PrimitiveGL

Run it with:

./Build/PrimitiveGL

Enable the debug overlay with:

./Build/PrimitiveGL --debug

Controls

• W - move forward
• S - move backward
• A - move left
• D - move right
• Q - turn left
• E - turn right
• Space - move up
• Shift - move down

Debug information

The window title always shows the current FPS.

With --debug, PrimitiveGL also displays:

• engine version and compile date
• FPS
• detected OpenGL version
• active OpenGL renderer / GPU
• GPU utilization when exposed by the driver
• driver-reported VRAM usage and renderer VRAM capacity when available
• scene object and rendered object counters
• texture count and texture memory counter
• viewport size and OpenGL vendor

GPU utilization and VRAM statistics are read from the system driver. Some older or unsupported drivers may not expose these counters; PrimitiveGL shows N/A instead of inventing a value.

The current demo opens a 640x480 window with a gray gradient background and an RGB color cube.

License

PrimitiveGL is released under the MIT License.