Background thread rendering to FBO

[Pygmy]

I'm using OpenTK in Windows.

I have an app with a user-interface, and I want to run a background thread for continuously rendering to a FrameBuffer Object.

Every rendered frame, I want to display (different parts of) this rendered texture in one or more controls in my UI.

Creating a render-thread is not a problem (making sure the context is only current in one thread at a time).
But how do I synchronize so that when the background thread has rendered a frame, OpenGL-controls in my UI-thread display (different parts of) the rendered texture ?

I assume first of all I need to wait for the GPU to finish rendering, and then somehow let the OpenGL-controls in the UI-thread draw a control-filling quad with the wanted coordinates in the rendered texture.

So does anybody know how I actually should approach and synchronize all this ?

[dehebo]

not done anything like this, but to me an event based system seems like one approach you could take.

So use a listener that the render and ui class register with. render fires an event when its has rendered the frame and the listener informs the ui.

I believe OGRE uses a event system for rendering frames, might be something you could look at if you look at this type of approach.

[Pygmy]

Okay, so say my renderthread has it's own window and context.
I render, then I *have* to wait until it's done using an awkward glFinish (the only thing happening on the main thread is just UI work), and then I fire an event notifying the UI thread a frame has finished. The UI thread binds the texture (in it's own context) and draws a textured-quad with the desired coords to the output-control.

Something like that ?

[carsten neumann]

take a look at glFenceSync (http://www.opengl.org/sdk/docs/man4/xhtml/glFenceSync.xml) and related functions or the ARB_sync (http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/ARB/sync.txt) extension for a way to avoid glFinish.