Removing flickering in OpenGL ES applications

Q:  My OpenGL ES application flickers. Especially when running on iPhone 3GS, the flickering seems to happen every frame. How do I fix this problem?

A: My OpenGL ES application flickers. Especially when running on iPhone 3GS, the flickering seems to happen every frame. How do I fix this problem?

By default, the contents of a renderbuffer are invalidated after it is presented to the screen (by calling -EAGLContext/presentRenderbuffer:). Your application must completely redraw the contents of the renderbuffer every time you draw a frame, otherwise you may observe flickering or other unexpected results.

You must provide a color to every pixel on the screen. At the beginning of your drawing code, it is a good idea to use glClear() to initialize the color buffer. A full-screen clear of each of your color, depth, and stencil buffers (if you're using them) at the start of a frame can also generally improve your application's performance.

If your application needs to preserve the drawable contents between frames, you can add the option kEAGLDrawablePropertyRetainedBacking = YES to your CAEAGLLayer object's drawableProperties property. Using this option requires additional memory and can reduce your application's performance.

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