Why is it better to explicitly manage matrices in OpenGL?

Question

Recently I've been messing around a fair amount with OpenGL, and I have come across the split between allowing OpenGL to manage the view/model/projection matrices or managing them yourself, either with your own matrix implementation or a library such as GLM. I've seen that a lot of large projects have their own camera management (i.e. manage their own translations, rotations etc.). I can see why it would help for making sure you have full control of the system, but besides this it seems like a lot of work for a marginal gain.

Why is it better to do your own management than to use the built-in OpenGL functions? Obviously this is in the context of a shader pipeline, not the fixed function default.

(This would apply to any 3D library).

Answer 1

(As an aside, OpenGL ES 2 has no transform management facility, so in some cases you have no choice.)

More on point, I've found managing matrices via OpenGL's built-in matrix stacks to be a real pain at times, forcing me to push and pop rather copiously in the more intricate portions of my rendering code, even reordering the rendering at times just to simplify stack management. I also wrote a C++ pusher-popper class that uses RAII to automatically manage all this, but it requires careful scoping of local variables.

When I switched to ES 2, I was dismayed to learn that all that functionality was gone. However, I found that switching to my own matrices actually simplified my code, because I could work with multiple transforms using a combination of local and member variables (with meaningful names) without getting lost in space, and the transform stack was replaced mainly by using the call stack — i.e., the current transform is a just local matrix variable that gets passed as a parent transform parameter to the next function down — but with the flexibility to do it differently at other times.