What's the concept of and differences between Framebuffer and Renderbuffer in OpenGL?

Viewed 46067

I'm confused about concept of Framebuffer and Renderbuffer. I know that they're required to render, but I want to understand them before use.

I know some bitmap buffer is required to store the temporary drawing result. The back buffer. And the other buffer is required to be seen on screen when those drawings are in progress. The front buffer. And flip them, and draw again. I know this concept, but it's hard to connect those objects to this concept.

What's the concept of and differences of them?

2 Answers

This page has some details which I think explain the difference quite nicely. Firstly:

The final rendering destination of the OpenGL pipeline is called [the] framebuffer.

Whereas:

Renderbuffer Object
In addition, renderbuffer object is newly introduced for offscreen rendering. It allows to render a scene directly to a renderbuffer object, instead of rendering to a texture object. Renderbuffer is simply a data storage object containing a single image of a renderable internal format. It is used to store OpenGL logical buffers that do not have corresponding texture format, such as stencil or depth buffer.

Related