Manipulating memory buffers.

[amit aides]

Hello,

I have no experience in openGL. I am writing an application that involves heavy image processing. My application recieves images in the form of bitmap buffers, manipulates them and then returns a bitmap buffer. My application doesn't display the image on the screen.
My question is: Can I use openGL to harness the power of the user's graphics card, to manipulate the buffers, even though I don't send them to the screen?

Thanks in advance,
Amit

[Aeluned]

What do you mean by "manipulate"?

The answer is probably no. Generally, when some processing has to be done on image data it is downloaded from the card (if it's stored as a texture) and worked with in system memory.

You can't really do anything with image data that's been uploaded to the graphics board.

[ZbuffeR]

>> You can't really do anything with image data that's been uploaded to the graphics board.

Of course you can !
Blend textures on a FBO with fancy GLSL shaders then readPixels to get back results.

Search for GPGPU for even more generic computations done with a graphic card.
http://developers.slashdot.org/artic...&tid=231&tid=8