Question

I have a question – I am learning OpenGL ES 2.0 from this tutorial and moving across this website, I have build nice app, with spinning polygon.
I find another guide where he used vertex shaders. What are the differences between them. What else I can make with shaders?

Answer 1

The difference is that the first tutorial uses OpenGL ES 1.1, and the second uses OpenGL ES 2.0. 1.1 used the fixed-function pipeline to do all of its rendering, while 2.0 exclusively uses shaders.

All of those matrix functions? glLoadIdentity, glFrustum, glRotate? They’re gone in 2.0. Instead, you write a program (shader) that executes on the GPU itself. The shader responsible for transforming vertex positions is called the “vertex shader”.

So the vertex shader replaces all of the automatic matrix transforms with a much more flexible, user-driven, computation system.