Rendering to an off-screen

Introduction Off-screen buffers allow programmers to generate complex procedural images in video memory that can then be bound as textures or even read back into system memory with the benefit of never corrupting the contents of the frame buffer. This allows developers to take full advantage of the accelerated graphics hardware to generate dynamic textures that can be used for real time effects such as reflections, refractions, light caustics, image processing and much more. In OpenGL, this is achieved through the use of pixel buffers, also known as pbuffers. On Windows platforms, pbuffers are accessed through the WGL_ARB_pbuffer extension.