FreeOrion

Tyreth,

Vertex buffers are actually DirectX lingo, they are similar to vertex arrays in OpenGL, except that in OpenGL you need an extension (which is standardized by now, I think it is no longer an extension in the OpenGL 1.4) to have them resident in video card memory as opposed to normal system memory. The reason this is not mentioned in the red book is that the latest version was written before this became standard.

Ive been learning basic OpenGL and 3dsMax at university. Weve used something called 'display lists', which as i understand allows for a 3d object to be quickly cloned and dsiplayed several times, without having to be entirely rendered each time. Is that similar to vertex arrays?

Display lists are something different than vertex arrays. They serve similar goals - draw chunks of geometry with one command, but for most purposes vertex arrays are much more efficient and flexible.