I imagine that this extension is quite easy to implement, but be able to bound a depth-stencil texture to two texture thingies, the first for reading the depth value (as a float in GLSL) and the second for reading the stencil value (as an int in GLSL). filtering and other glTexParamater affecting loopup only affect depth reading and reading stencil always gives raw value… there is a way to get the stencil values readable via an an old (2001) NV extension: GL_NV_copy_depth_to_color, but it forces one to copy the depth and stencil values from the currently bound framebuffer(so to sue it the depth stencil texture is attached to an FBO) to a texture, packing the depth into RGB and the stencil into A, and then one read the texture as a color texture, needing to perform the conversion into int for the stencil yourself, doing it this way though is kind of silly: copy the data to read it…
in other news I am very, very happy about the nVidia’s bindless extension, now just hope it gets to core or atleast ARB status somehow in some form.