Display Lists Tutorial Display Lists are about performance. It
is a simple way of enhancing your OpenGL application making it
run faster. In order to follow this tutorial you should know the
basics of GLUT and OpenGL. If there is anything that is not
quite clear please let me know and I'll try to improve it. Your
feedback is important. I hope you enjoy this tutorial. What is a
DL At a first glance a display list can be seen just as a
function in a computer program. You define it once and can use
it as many times as you want. A display list stores a group of
OpenGL commands so that they can be used repeatedly just by
calling the display list. Consider for instance that you're
modeling a car. You can define a wheel in a display list and
then call it four times with the appropriate translations.
However a Display List does something more, when you create a
Display List the OpenGL commands within are "precompiled" and,
if possible, stored in the graphics card memory. Therefore, in
general the execution of a Displ