Graphics hardware has rapidly evolved from simple accelerated framebuffer devices up to modern day general purpose GPUs with programmable pipelines. As such, the OpenGL API that first appeared in 1992 encourages a programming style that works very poorly (from a performance perspective) on modern hardware. Subsequent revisions of the API have steadily removed obsolete methods of programming to focus on providing a small and simple interface to the extremely general programming model that modern graphics hardware allows.

This document attempts to describe the different vertex specification methods that have been added to OpenGL over the course of its development.