Extension
(Simulating) KHR_debug on MacOS X
KHR_debug makes finding errors in OpenGL applications much simpler than the old glGetError method. Sadly, Apple does not yet support KHR_debug (or any other debug extension) natively in OS X 10.8 and it doesn’t look too well for 10.9 either. On most other systems the latest drivers will provide KHR_debug either as an extension or […]
OpenGL debugging with KHR_debug
Debugging OpenGL has always been a bit painful. In most cases an OpenGL error will just result in the offending call being ignored (unless the problem was too little memory, in which case anything could happen). To get informed of the problem, the application had to query an error number for OpenGL to get the […]
OpenGL Programmable Blending – APPLE_shader_framebuffer_fetch
Large parts of the rendering pipeline are user programmable through shaders nowadays. One of the remaining fixed-functions is fragment blending: The new fragments (shaded by the fragment shader) don’t neccessarily have to overwrite the corresponding framebuffer entry, we can set different blending operations. The set of possible operations however is fixed. There have been requests […]
MacOS X OpenGL driver status
MacOS X 10.8 Mountain Lion was released earlier today and with it the hope for updated OpenGL. Currently the OpenGL Capability Table isn’t updated for 10.8 (or even 10.7.4) yet but there haven’t been much improvements anyway: Current OpenGL support is still 3.2. GL_ARB_instanced_arrays, GL_ARB_occlusion_query2 and GL_ARB_timer_query are still the only supported extensions from OpenGL […]
Texture Compression
We all know image compression from common formats like JPEG or PNG. For rendering the textures can be compressed as well, but here different formats are used than the ones we are familiar with. The reason here is that there are special requirements when it comes to texture compression: Small texture size Fast decompression Fast […]
WebGL Statistics
Currently there is only one version on WebGL and just a hand-full extensions. But this does not boil down the question of WebGL support to a simple yes/no question. For some requirements of the GPU, WebGL only defines a lower limit to support (e.g. tiny textures of just 64*64 texels!) but each implementation can support […]
Partially Resident Textures – AMD_sparse_texture
AMD has just released more infos about the new feature of the Radeon 7xxx GPUs: Partially Resident Textures. PRT is a new way of getting some hardware support for MegaTextures / VirtualTexturing as it is for example implemented in Rage right now and as it is planned (with PRT support) e.g. for Doom 4. The […]