What are the steps necessary to render my scene to a Framebuffer Object(FBO) and then render that FBO to the screen?

Question

I've got a fairly complicated scene with many GL_POINTS that I need to render. The scene will be largely static, so I'd like to render it to a Framebuffer Object and then only update that FBO when my scene actually changes. I'd then like to render the FBO to the screen each frame.

I've found examples that render an FBO into a texture. I've found examples that render an FBO into a RenderBuffer (still not quite sure what that is). I'm not sure what the steps are to achieve this. Do I need to render to a texture and the draw the texture to the screen?

Can you please enumerate the steps (ideally even in pseudocode or actual code) to render my scene to an FBO and then draw that FBO to the screen.

draw() is sufficient for a placeholder for my own drawing functions.

Answer 1

Here is alternative example which does not require textures:

// copy framebuffer
if(fboUsed)
{
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, fboId);
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_DRAW_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
    glBlitFramebuffer(0, 0, TEXTURE_WIDTH, TEXTURE_HEIGHT,
                      0, 0, screenWidth, screenHeight,
                      GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT,
                      GL_LINEAR);
    glBindFramebuffer(GL_READ_FRAMEBUFFER, 0);
 }

Replace variables in blit with your own.

Apperently frame buffer 0 is front buffer. fboId is your frame buffer number.