Graphics libraries

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.

Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language.

WebGL (short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerated usage of physics, image processing, and effects in the HTML canvas. WebGL elements can be mixed with other HTML elements and composited with other parts of the page or page background.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies a programming language (based on C99) for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based

Vulkan is a cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and operating systems, and modern multi-core CPUs also.

free software multimedia library

ImageMagick, invoked from the command line as magick, is a free and open-source cross-platform software suite for displaying, creating, converting, modifying, and editing raster images. It can read and write over 200 image file formats and is widely used in open-source applications. ImageMagick was created by John Cristy in 1987.

Direct3D is a graphics application programming interface (API) for Microsoft Windows. Part of DirectX, Direct3D is used to render three-dimensional graphics in applications where performance is important, such as games. Direct3D uses hardware acceleration if available on the graphics card, allowing for hardware acceleration of the entire 3D rendering pipeline or even only partial acceleration. Direct3D exposes the advanced graphics capabilities of 3D graphics hardware, including Z-buffering, W-buffering, stencil buffering, spatial anti-aliasing, alpha blending, color blending, mipmapping, text

Microsoft Windows component responsible for representing objects as output devices such as monitors and printers

free and open-source library for 3D graphics rendering

software library for video game development

not-for-profit member-funded industry consortium

cross-platform software development library designed to provide a simple application programming interface (API) to various multimedia components in computers

free software

graphics library

graphics rendering API by Apple

Three.js is a cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface (API) used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser using WebGL. The source code is hosted in a repository on GitHub.

The Generic Graphics Library (GEGL) is a programming library under development for image processing applications. It is mainly developed for GIMP in order to add support for higher bit depth images, and non-destructive editing. It was partially implemented in GIMP 2.6, with more added in 2.8, and is now a central part in 2.10. Many Filters are ready, but also much work in progress. Target is full support of all important filters in roadmap in Version 3.0. It is also used by GNOME's Photos and gedl.

libjpeg is a free library with functions for handling the JPEG image data format. It implements a JPEG codec (encoding and decoding) alongside various utilities for handling JPEG data. It is written in C and distributed as free software together with its source code under the terms of a custom permissive (BSD-like) free software license, which demands attribution. The original variant is maintained and published by the Independent JPEG Group (IJG). Meanwhile, there are several forks with additional features.

libpng is the official Portable Network Graphics (PNG) reference library (originally called pnglib). It is a platform-independent library that contains C functions for handling PNG images. It supports almost all of PNG's features, is extensible, and has been widely used and tested for over 28 years. libpng is dependent on zlib for data compression and decompression routines.

Verge3D is a real-time renderer and a toolkit used for creating interactive 3D experiences running on websites.

library for the Python programming language

3D graphics software

Direct2D is a 2D vector graphics application programming interface (API) designed by Microsoft and implemented in Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and also Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (with Platform Update installed).

The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) is an open-source software library that provides bindings to a variety of C libraries for video game developers to Java. It exposes cross-platform libraries commonly used in developing video games and multimedia titles, such as Vulkan, OpenGL, GLFW, OpenAL and OpenCL.

program library designed to aid in rendering computer graphics to a monitor

non-destructive image processing technology

graphics library

MuPDF is a free and open-source software framework written in C that implements a PDF, XPS, and EPUB parsing and rendering engine. It is used primarily to render pages into bitmaps, but also provides support for other operations such as searching and listing the table of contents and hyperlinks.

DirectFB (Direct Frame Buffer), now continued as DirectFB2, is a software library with a small memory footprint that provides graphics acceleration, input device handling and abstraction layer, and integrated windowing system with support for translucent windows and multiple display layers on top of the Linux framebuffer without requiring any kernel modifications. DirectFB is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

graphic coprocessor for Android

librsvg, (occasionally stylized as LibRsvg) is a free software SVG rendering library written as part of the GNOME project, intended to be lightweight and portable. The Linux command-line program rsvg-convert uses the library to turn SVG files into raster images.

libGDX is a free and open-source game-development application framework written in the Java programming language with some C and C++ components for performance dependent code. It allows for the development of desktop and mobile games by using the same code base. It is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, BlackBerry and web browsers with WebGL support.

thumb|Calibration screen

graphics library included with many Borland compiler products in the 1990s

X11 XToolkit Intrinsics library used to manage resources and events

visual HTML5-based 2D game editor

OpenVG is an API designed for hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics. Its primary platforms are mobile phones, gaming & media consoles and consumer electronic devices. It was designed to help manufacturers create more attractive user interfaces by offloading computationally intensive graphics processing from the CPU onto a GPU to save energy. The OpenGL ES library provides similar functionality for 3D graphics. OpenVG is managed by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group.

WebCL (Web Computing Language) is a JavaScript binding to OpenCL for heterogeneous parallel computing within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins, first announced in March 2011. It is developed on similar grounds as OpenCL and is considered as a browser version of the latter. Primarily, WebCL allows web applications to actualize speed with multi-core CPUs and GPUs. With the growing popularity of applications that need parallel processing like image editing, augmented reality applications and sophisticated gaming, it has become more important to improve the computational speed

GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) is a library that acts as a wrapper around the low-level functions provided by the underlying windowing and graphics systems. GDK lies between the display server and the GTK library, handling basic rendering such as drawing primitives, raster graphics (bitmaps), cursors, fonts, as well as window events and drag-and-drop functionality.

Java library for creating, editing, and rendering SVG

QuickDraw was the 2D graphics library and associated application programming interface (API) which is a core part of classic Mac OS. It was initially written by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. QuickDraw still existed as part of the libraries of Mac OS X, but had been largely superseded by the more modern Quartz graphics system. In Mac OS X Tiger, QuickDraw has been officially deprecated. In Mac OS X Leopard applications using QuickDraw cannot make use of the added 64-bit support. In OS X Mountain Lion, QuickDraw header support was removed from the operating system. Applications using QuickDr

ARToolKit is an open-source computer tracking library for creation of augmented reality applications that overlay virtual imagery on the real world. Currently, it is maintained as an open-source project hosted on GitHub.

Blend4Web is a free and open source framework for creating and displaying interactive 3D computer graphics in web browsers.

2D graphics rendering API

DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the client's computer. DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory, hardware overlays, hardware blitters, and page flipping. Its video memory manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capa

Raylib (stylized as raylib) is a cross-platform open-source software development library. The library was made to create graphical applications and games.

'''Developer's Image Library or DevIL''', started by Denton Woods, is a cross-platform image library which aims to provide a common API for different image file formats. It consists of three parts: the main library (IL), the utility library (ILU) and the utility toolkit (ILUT), mirroring the corresponding parts of OpenGL (although the OpenGL Utility Toolkit is not part of the OpenGL specification).

GraphicsMagick is a fork of ImageMagick, emphasizing stability of both programming API and command-line options. It was branched off ImageMagick's version 5.5.2 in 2002 after irreconcilable differences emerged in the developers' group.

Babylon.js is a JavaScript library and 3D engine for displaying real time 3D graphics in a web browser via HTML5. The source code is available on GitHub and distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

SVGAlib, styled as "Linux SuperVGA Graphics Library", is a legacy open-source low-level graphics library for accessing SuperVGA hardware on PC-compatible systems running on Linux, with later ports to AmigaOS and FreeBSD. SVGAlib allowed programs to change video mode to display full-screen graphics, without the use of a windowing system. Alongside X11 and the General Graphics Interface, it was one of the earliest libraries allowing graphical video games on Linux.

OpenJPEG is an open-source library to encode and decode JPEG 2000 images. As of version 2.1 released in April 2014, it is officially conformant with the JPEG 2000 Part-1 standard. It was subsequently adopted by ImageMagick instead of JasPer in 6.8.8-2 and approved as new reference software for this standard in July 2015. OpenJPEG is a fork of libj2k, a JPEG-2000 codec library written by David Janssens during his master thesis at University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in 2001. In April 2016 Grok was forked from libopenjp2 by Aaron Boxer under the more restrictive AGPL. He was aiming to close up to t

Netpbm (formerly Pbmplus) is an open-source package of graphics programs and a programming library. It is used primarily in Unix, where it is found in all major open-source operating system distributions, but also works on Microsoft Windows, macOS, and other operating systems.

GNU plotutils is a set of free software command-line tools and software libraries for generating 2D plot graphics based on data sets. It is used in projects such as PSPP and UMLgraph, and in many areas of academic research, and is included in many Linux distributions such as Debian. Windows and Mac OS X versions are also available. The library provides bindings for the C and C++ languages. Its stand-alone command-line tools can generate graphs and perform numerical calculation of spline curves and systems of ordinary differential equations. Plotutils is a GNU package and is distributed under a

proprietary graphics API

ClanLib is a video game SDK, supporting Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux, with partial support for mobile platforms. It has full hardware accelerated graphics support through OpenGL, and also a software renderer. ClanLib also helps in playing sound, using the Vorbis or MikMod libraries, and has classes for collision detection, GUIs, XML, networking, and other things that may be helpful to a game programmer.

LibTIFF is a library for reading and writing Tag Image File Format (abbreviated TIFF) files. The set also contains command line tools for processing TIFFs. It is distributed in source code and can be found as binary builds for all kinds of platforms. The LibTIFF software was originally written by Sam Leffler while working for Silicon Graphics.

PHIGS ('''Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System''') is an application programming interface (API) standard for rendering 3D computer graphics, considered to be the 3D graphics standard for the 1980s through the early 1990s. Subsequently, a combination of features and power led to the rise of OpenGL, which became the most popular professional 3D API of the mid to late 1990s.

PlayCanvas is an open-source 3D game engine/interactive 3D application engine alongside a proprietary cloud-hosted creation platform that allows for simultaneous editing from multiple computers via a browser-based interface. It runs in modern browsers that support WebGL, including Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. The engine is capable of rigid-body physics simulation, handling three-dimensional audio and 3D animations.