Rendering to an invisible buffer and reading the results

[liors]

I wanted to know if it's possible to render several objects to a scene and then read the pixel buffers to get color information, all this without creating an actual window. How do you specify pixel size for the scene rendered?

[hh10k]

Perhaps it's possible to create a pbuffer without a window (I can't remember the details of pbuffers), but is there something really bad with creating a window and just hiding it from the user?

[liors]

I'm implementing an algorithm and want to get help from the H/W to do some of the calculations, I dont want to mess with windows, I dont need to actually see the results

[liors]

What I think I need to do is create a Bitmap, get the HDC to it and using WGL set it as the drawing context. Did anybody do this or have a sample of working with the wgl?

[kehziah]

Originally posted by liors:
What I think I need to do is create a Bitmap, get the HDC to it and using WGL set it as the drawing context. Did anybody do this or have a sample of working with the wgl?

If you choose bitmap, you're stuck with Microsoft GDI Generic implementation (outdated software implementation).