Overview¶

What is it?¶

Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, “Bring Your Own Engine/Framework” style rendering library, licensed under permissive BSD-2 clause open source license.

Internals¶

bgfx is using sort-based draw call bucketing. This means that submission order doesn’t necessarily match the rendering order, but on the low-level they will be sorted and ordered correctly. On the high level this allows more optimal way of submitting draw calls for all passes at one place, and on the low-level this allows better optimization of rendering order. This sometimes creates undesired results usually for GUI rendering, where draw order should usually match submit order. bgfx provides way to enable sequential rendering for these cases (see bgfx::setViewSeq).

Internally all low-level rendering draw calls are issued inside single function RendererContextI::submit. This function exist inside each renderer backend implementation.

found at: | Order your graphics draw calls around!

Customization¶

By default each platform has sane default values. For example on Windows default renderer is DirectX9, and on Linux it is OpenGL 2.1. On Windows platform all rendering backends are available. For OpenGL ES on desktop you can find more information at:- OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL on desktop

If you’re targeting specific mobile hardware, you can find GLES support in their official SDKs: Adreno SDK, Mali SDK, PowerVR SDK.

All configuration settings are located inside src/config.h.

Every BGFX_CONFIG_* setting can be changed by passing defines thru compiler switches. For example setting preprocessor define BGFX_CONFIG_RENDERER_OPENGL=1 will change backend renderer to OpenGL 2.1. on Windows. Since rendering APIs are platform specific, this obviously won’t work nor make sense in all cases. Certain platforms have only single choice, for example the Native Client works only with OpenGL ES 2.0 renderer, using anything other than that will result in build errors.

Debugging and Profiling¶

SDL, GLFW, etc.¶

It is possible to use bgfx with SDL, GLFW and similar cross platform windowing libraries. The main requirement is that windowing library provides access to native window handle that’s used to create Direct3D device or OpenGL context.

Using bgfx with SDL example:

#include <SDL.h>
#include <bgfx/bgfxplatform.h> // it must be included after SDL to enable SDL
                               // integration code path.

#include <bgfx/bgfx.h>
...

int main(...
{
    SDL_window* window = SDL_CreateWindow(...
    bgfx::sdlSetWindow(window);

    ...
    bgfx::init();

Todo¶

• Occlusion queries.
• Fullscreen mode.
• ETC2, PVRTC1/2 decoding fallback for targets that don’t support it natively.
• shaderc as library for runtime shader building.
• texturec tool with support for all supported texture formats.
• Multiple vertex streams support.
• Animated mesh example.
• Vulkan renderer backend.

Getting Involved¶

Everyone is welcome to contribute to bgfx by submitting bug reports, testing on different platforms, writing examples, improving documentation, profiling and optimizing, etc.