As we covered in Chapter 1, Introduction to the Raspberry Pi's Architecture and Setup, of this title, the Raspberry Pi 2 comes equipped with a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU.
A GPU is a piece of electronic hardware specifically geared towards calculating complex mathematics and altering memory at high speed for the creation and manipulation of images in a frame buffer.
You will be exploring how to access the frame buffer via a C program shortly.
The graphical processing unit the Raspberry Pi 2 comes with provides a variety of features, including OpenMAX, Open EGL, OpenGL 1.1 and 2.2, and Open VG1.1. We will explore some of these briefly later in this chapter as well.
However, due to the complexity of these technologies, it is out of the scope of this book to delve into each in detail. For those who are interested, a comprehensive guide can be found at https://jan.newmarch.name/RPi/, including example programs.
In order to showcase some of the abilities of the GPU you will find a number...