Originally posted by Adruab: I mean I’m sure there are specific things drivers do with memory for different purposes. But man… how much bandwidth would you save on a GPU cloth simulation (for instance) where you could just read back in the texture as vertex position rather than texture fetch for every vertex. It simplifies things sooooo much. I want to see this extension too, since that would be a welcome jump up to and beyond D3D’s current capabilities. Go ARB Go!!!
The combination of GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object does exactly what you mentioned. I’ve tested it with RGBA8 backbuffer and fp16 and fp32 rgba pbuffer formats, works like a charm (Geforce 6800 GT).
Originally posted by Korval:
[b] [quote]Nah, it is a derivative from NV_fragment_program
I am virtually certain that ARB_fp was first.
they have extended ARB_vp/fp for now.
No they haven’t.[/b][/QUOTE]I don’t claim to have perfect memory, but refering to the dates in the docs :
ARB_fp : 5/10/2002 is the earliest
NV_fp : 10/12/2001 is the earliest
As for appearance in drivers,
I think when the 9700 was fresh out, some people
made demoes for ARB, and I think I was complaining that I could not run them on my NVidia, cause it only had NV versions.
Oh SirKnight’s priceless, isn’t he?
So pre-occupied with trying to maintain that pretence of knowledge, he doesn’t care what conversations he hijacks. Unlike me of course.
SirKnight didn’t even post in this thread, yet you continue to attack him. Your behavior is beginning to become disruptive to the forum as a whole, and your 1-man vendetta against SirKnight (who contributes something other than bile to this forum, btw) is both disruptive and annoying.
Ok, I retract all I have said. It was churlish and distracting. I suggest you two troll-feeders do the same. I love SirKnight - he’s an example to us all.
There are problems with getting the community involved, and IP isn’t the big one, AFAIK. Think about it like this. Had we posted all the meeting minutes to the forums, you still wouldn’t have a spec.
Moreover, people would post comments and make suggestions, but the folks in the WG would likely not have enough time to filter through all that. The end result would be that, not only would people be upset that the spec is taking a long time, people would be upset that their suggestions / comments were largely ignored. For superbuffers, a lot of the discussion has been about the implementability (is that a word???) of the extension, so random folks in the community wouldn’t have much to contribute. That, of course, isn’t true for all extensions .
Community involvement is always tricky in mostly-open things like the ARB. I don’t know what the new process is, but it used to be that pretty much any random Joe could sign the participants agreements and start coming to meetings. I know the process has changed recently, but I think it is still possible for people to directly participate.
Like I said before, the biggest reason for the dealy in this much needed extension is that we spent about 8 months going down a long, windy, false path.
Ok this is the first time I read this thread (I know it’s been going on for a while). Wow, not even contributing to a thread and I’m being talked about. Boy I tell you what, I made the big time now. Tears rolling down my eye balls. I feel so loved.
Anyway, I guess I’d like to say to count me in on this wanting a better RTT scheme. Sure I can get my job done with pbuffers but as already said, all that context mess is just well…mess. I’m assuming though that when one of these better RTT extensions are finally done that it will work on a broad range of hardware and not the latest and greatest. Sure I currently have a ‘latest and greatest’ but I kind of like other people who don’t have this ability to be able to run my stuff. Speaking of that, I need a freaking webpage. Like…a real one and stuff, ya know?
Indeed… why don’t we have a very simple tempo extension that would make it possible to create a texture with a “renderable” flag, and a format that could either be 4 uchar or float ?
We don’t even need 16 bits textures support, depth or stencil textures and the like at first.
Tears rolling down my eye balls. I feel so loved. 
?