What is the difference between retained and immediate mode GUI?

Question

I’ve been having problems with differentiating the two.

Thanks in advance!

In: Technology

Answer 1

When asking a GUI library to draw something…

…in retained mode, it retains that request in a list until it is time to render the scene. When it’s time to render, it goes through the list rendering each item. It may do pre-processing on that list (e.g., z-ordering or optimisation) before rendering too.

…in immediate mode, it immediately renders the request to the screen and nothing more.