OpenGL.GL.GREMEDY.string_marker

OpenGL extension GREMEDY.string_marker

This module customises the behaviour of the OpenGL.raw.GL.GREMEDY.string_marker to provide a more Python-friendly API

Overview (from the spec)

This extension defines a mechanism to insert textual markers into the OpenGL stream.

When debugging or profiling an OpenGL application some of the most important tools are stream loggers, which just output a list of the called OpenGL commands, and profilers, which show at which points the pipeline is bottlenecked for a given part of the frame. The problem in using these is that there is a definite loss of information between the application and the used debugger/profiler. The application generally has a pretty good idea what is rendered when (e.g. rendering background, landscape, building, players, particle effects, bullets etc.), but the debugger/profiler only sees the OpenGL stream. To analyze the stream developers have to guess what is done when by following the program code and the log output in parallel, which can get difficult for systems that restructure their internal pipeline or do lazy changes.

This extension is really only useful for these debuggers and profilers, and not for actual drivers. In fact, it is not expected that any standard driver would ever implement this extension. The main point of having this extension is to allow applications to have a clean way of accessing this functionality only when they are run under the control of a debugger/profiler, without having to recompile or change the application source code.

The official definition of this extension is available here: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/GREMEDY/string_marker.txt