A graphics library or graphics API is a program

library A library is a collection of Book, books, and possibly other Document, materials and Media (communication), media, that is accessible for use by its members and members of allied institutions. Libraries provide physical (hard copies) or electron ...

designed to aid in rendering

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

to a monitor. This typically involves providing optimized versions of functions that handle common rendering tasks. This can be done purely in

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

and running on the CPU, common in embedded systems, or being hardware accelerated by a GPU, more common in PCs. By employing these functions, a program can assemble an image to be output to a monitor. This relieves the programmer of the task of creating and optimizing these functions, and allows them to focus on building the graphics program. Graphics libraries are mainly used in

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

s and simulations. The use of graphics libraries in connection with

video production Video production is the process of producing video content. It is the equivalent of filmmaking, but with video recorded either as analog signals on videotape, digitally in video tape or as computer files stored on optical discs, hard drives, SSDs, ...

systems, such as Pixar RenderMan, is not covered here. Some APIs use Graphics Library (GL) in their name, notably

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

and WebGL.

Examples

* Allegro *

ANGLE In Euclidean geometry, an angle can refer to a number of concepts relating to the intersection of two straight Line (geometry), lines at a Point (geometry), point. Formally, an angle is a figure lying in a Euclidean plane, plane formed by two R ...

* Cairo (graphics) * DFPSR https://dawoodoz.com/dfpsr.html — GUI toolkit and software renderer *

DirectX Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct" ...

— a library created by Microsoft, to run under Windows operating systems and 'Direct' Xbox * Display PostScript * emWin — an Embedded Graphics Library * FLTK — GUI Toolkit and Graphics Library * GTK — a GUI toolkit * Mesa 3D — a library that implements OpenGL and Vulkan * Mobile 3D Graphics API * Qt — cross-platform application framework * Quartz (graphics layer) * SFML
SIGIL
— Sound, Input, and Graphics Integration Library * Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) * Skia Graphics Library *

X Window System The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Graphics Library

Examples

See also

References