I have a RGBA pixmap (e.g. an antialiased circular 4x4 dot) that I want to draw over a texture in a way similar to a brush stroke. The obvious solution of using glTexSubImage2D just overwrites a rectangular area with no respect to alpha value. Is there a better solution than the obvious maintaining a mirrored version of the texture in local RAM, doing a blending there and then using glTexSubImage2D to upload it - preferrably OpenGL/GPU based one? Is FBO the way to go?
Also, is using FBO for this efficient both in terms of maintaining 1:1 graphics quality (no artifacts, interpolation etc) and in terms of speed? With 4x4 object in RAM doing a CPU blending is basically transforming 4x4 matrix with basic float arithmetics, totalling to 16 simple math iterations & 1 glTexSubImage2D call... is setting an FBO, switching rendering contexts & doing the rendering still faster?
Benchmarking data would be very appreciated, as well as MVCEs/pseudocode for proposed solutions.
Note: creating separate alpha-blended quads for each stroke is not an option, mainly due to very high amount of strokes used. Go science!
You can render to a texture with a framebuffer object (FBO).
At the start of your program, create an FBO and attach the texture to it. Whenever you need to draw a stroke, bind the FBO and draw the stroke as if you were drawing it to the screen (with triangles). The stroke gets written to the attached texture.
For your main draw loop, unbind the FBO, bind the attached texture, and draw a quad over the entire screen (from -1,-1 to 1,1 without using any matrices).
Also, is using FBO for this efficient both in terms of maintaining 1:1 graphics quality (no artifacts, interpolation etc) and in terms of speed?
Yes.
If the attached texture is as big as the window, then there are no artifacts.
You only need to switch to the FBO when adding a new stroke, after which you can forget about the stroke since it's already rendered to the texture.
The GPU does all of the sampling, interpolation, blending, etc., and it's much better at it than the CPU (after all, it's what the GPU is designed for)
Switching FBO's isn't that expensive. Modern games can switch FBOs for render-to-texture several times a frame while still pumping out thousands of triangles; One FBO switch per frame isn't going to kill a 2D app, even on a mobile platform.
Related
I would like to retrieve the z height of each pixels of a rendered object in a scene.
I will need to retrieve the color rendered too.
What are the opengl technics to implement ?
glReadPixels and CPU side code
use glReadPixels to obtain both RGB and Depth buffers. Here examples for both:
depth buffer got by glReadPixels is always 1
OpenGL Scale Single Pixel Line
That will read the buffers into CPU accessible memory. This way is slow (due to sync) but should work on any platform.
FBO render to texture and GPU shader
Faster method is to use FBO and render to texture and use that output in next rendering pass as input texture for computing your stuff inside shaders. This however will not run properly on Intel and might need additional tweaking of code between nVidia and AMD.
If you have per pixel output use single QUAD covering your screen as the second rendering pass.
If you got single output for the whole screen instead use single POINT render and compute all in the fragment shader (scann the whole texture inside) something like this:
How to implement 2D raycasting light effect in GLSL
The difference is that by usnig shaders and FBO you are not transferring data between GPU/CPU so its way faster.
The content of the targeted textures can be still readed by CPU using texture related GL functions
compute GPU shaders
There are also compute shaders out there but I did not use them yet so I am just guessing however with them it might be possible to do your stuff in single pass and also the form of the result and computation should not be as limiting.
My bet is that you are doing some post processing similar to Deferred Shading so googling such topic/tutorials might help.
I have a 512X512 texture which holds a number of images that i want to use in my application. After adding the image data to the texture i save the texture coords for the individual images. Later i apply these on some quads that i am drawing. The texture has mipmapping activated.
When i take a screenshot of the rendered scene at exactly the same instance in two different runs of the applications, i notice that there are differences in the image only among those quads textured using this mipmapped texture. Can mipmapping cause such an issue?
My best guess is that it has to do with precisions in your shader. Check out this problem that I had (and fought with for a while) and my solution:
opengl texture mapping off by 5-8 pixels
It probably is a combination of mimapping's automatic scaling of your texture atlas and the precision hints in your shader code.
Also see the other linked question:
Why is a texture coordinate of 1.0 getting beyond the edge of the texture?
I want to draw fullscreen frames of a sequence, and switch between them fast. I saw that I could attach multiply color attachments to a framebuffer.
I'm wondering if it could be far cheaper to use renderbuffer attachments instead of the current textured quads method.
How can I switch between attachments by the way? Is there a maximum number of attachments?
I want to draw fullscreen frames of a sequence, and switch between them fast.
Drawing images always means uploading the data to a texture and drawing a quad using that texture. Look into Pixel Buffer Objects to implement asynchronous data upload and glTexStorage (OpenGL-4.2 feature) for how to bolt the memory layout down.
I saw that I could attach multiply color attachments to a framebuffer.
The framebuffers this applies to are off-screen framebuffer objects, and not the on screen framebuffer. I.e. this won't help you in any way.
To clarify, when I say 'default framebuffer' I mean the one provided by the windowing system and what ends up on your monitor.
To improve my rendering speeds for a CAD app, I've managed to separate out the 3D elements from the Qt-handled 2D ones, and they now each render into their own FBO. When the time comes to get them onto the screen, I blit the 3D FBO onto the default FB, and then I want to blend my 2D FBO on top of it.
I've gotten to the blitting part fine, but I can't see how to blend my 2D FBO onto it? Both FBOs are identical in size and format, and they are both the same as the default FB.
I'm sure it's a simple operation, but I can't find anything on the net - presumably I'm missing the right term for what I am trying to do. Although I'm using Qt, I can use native OpenGL commands without issue.
A blit operation is ultimately a pixel copy operation. If you want to layer one image on top of another, you can't blit it. You must instead render a full-screen quad as a texture and use the proper blending parameters for your blending operation.
You can use GL_EXT_framebuffer_blit to blit contents of the framebuffer object to the application framebuffer (or to any other). Although, as the spec states, it is not possible to use blending:
The pixel copy bypasses the fragment pipeline. The only fragment
operations which affect the blit are the pixel ownership test and
the scissor test.
So any blending means to use fragment shader as suggested. One fullscreen pass with blending should be pretty cheap, I believe there is nothing to worry about.
use shader to read back from frame buffer. this is OpenGL ES extension, not support by all hardware.
https://www.khronos.org/registry/gles/extensions/EXT/EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch.txt
Can anyone pls tell me how to use hardware memory to create textures in OpenGL ? Currently I'm running my game in window mode, do I need to switch to fullscreen to get the use of hardware ?
If I can create textures in hardware, is there a limit for no of textures (other than the hardware memory) ? and then how can I cache my textures into hardware ? Thanks.
This should be covered by almost all texture tutorials for OpenGL. For example here, here and here.
For every texture you first need a texture name. A texture name is like a unique index for a single texture. Every name points to a texture object that can have its own parameters, data, etc. glGenTextures is used to get new names. I don't know if there is any limit besides the uint range (2^32). If there is then you will probably get 0 for all new texture names (and a gl error).
The next step is to bind your texture (see glBindTexture). After that all operations that use or affect textures will use the texture specified by the texture name you used as parameter for glBindTexture. You can now set parameters for the texture (glTexParameter) and upload the texture data with glTexImage2D (for 2D textures). After calling glTexImage you can also free the system memory with your texture data.
For static textures all this has to be done only once. If you want to use the texture you just need to bind it again and enable texturing (glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D)).
The size (width/height) for a single texture is limited by GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE. This is normally 4096, 8192 or 16384. It is also limited by the available graphics memory because it has to fit into it together with some other resources like the framebuffer or vertex buffers. All textures together can be bigger then the available memory but then they will be swapped.
In most cases the graphics driver should decide which textures are stored in system memory and which in graphics memory. You can however give certain textures a higher priority with either glPrioritizeTextures or with glTexParameter.
Edit:
I wouldn't worry too much about where textures are stored because the driver normally does a very good job with that. Textures that are used often are also more likely to be stored in graphics memory. If you set a priority that's just a "hint" for the driver on how important it is for the texture to stay on the graphics card. It's also possible the the priority is completely ignored. You can also check where textures currently are with glAreTexturesResident.
Usually when you talk about generating a texture on the GPU, you're not actually creating texture images and applying them like normal textures. The simpler and more common approach is to use Fragment shaders to procedurally calculate the colors of for each pixel in real time from scratch for every single frame.
The canonical example for this is to generate a Mandelbrot pattern on the surface of an object, say a teapot. The teapot is rendered with its polygons and texture coordinates by the application. At some stage of the rendering pipeline every pixel of the teapot passes through the fragment shader which is a small program sent to the GPU by the application. The fragment shader reads the 2D texture coordinates and calculates the Mandelbrot set color of the 2D coordinates and applies it to the pixel.
Fullscreen mode has nothing to do with it. You can use shaders and generate textures even if you're in window mode. As I mentioned, the textures you create never actually occupy space in the texture memory, they are created on the fly. One could probably think of a way to capture and cache the generated texture but this can be somewhat complex and require multiple rendering passes.
You can learn more about it if you look up "GLSL" in google - the OpenGL shading language.
This somewhat dated tutorial shows how to create a simple fragment shader which draws the Mandelbrot set (page 4).
If you can get your hands on the book "OpenGL Shading Language, 2nd Edition", you'll find it contains a number of simple examples on generating sky, fire and wood textures with the help of an external 3D Perlin noise texture from the application.
To create a texture on GPU look into "render to texture" tutorials. There are two common methods: Binding a PBuffer context as texture, or using Frame Buffer Objects. PBuffer render to textures are the older method, and have the wider support. Frame Buffer Objects are easier to use.
Also you don't have to switch to "fullscreen" mode for OpenGL to be HW accelerated. In fact OpenGL doesn't know about windows at all. A fullscreen OpenGL window is just that: A toplvel window on top of all other windows with no decorations and the input focus grabed. Some drivers bypass window masking and clipping code, and employ a simpler, faster buffer swap method if the window with the active OpenGL context covers the whole screen, thus gaining a little performance, but with current hard- and software the effect is very small compared to other influences.