8-bits textures

[Antoche]

Does the 256 colours textures increase the speed of the rendering (maybe the cards are designed for instead of 32bits textures ?). And how can i set the palette of the texture ? I know how to get it, but i don't manage to give the palette to OpenGL. I saw a glGetPaletteEXT or something like that, but I don't know how to use ewtentions. Can anyone help me ?
Thanks,
Antoche

[Sjonny]

You can only load RGB/RGBA formatted pictures with OpenGL.
Thus if you have an 8 bit picture with pallete, pixel 0 with value 13 has color 13 in your pallette, this gives you three values in the range 0..63 (probably).
red = pal[13].red/63*255;
green = pal[13].green/63*255;
blue = pal[13].blue/63*255;

Hope this helps, (and that I got it correct too)
John

[This message has been edited by Sjonny (edited 03-22-2000).]

[fenris]

Another good way to upload 8-bit textures is to expand the texture to 24-bits (RGB triplets) when you read the texture file.
You'll wanna read the palette data from the file and store it in a lookup table ( char [256][3] ) and then for each pixel read from the texture, use the lookup table to get the RGB values, and store those in the texture buffer. Then just upload the texture buffer as usual to OpenGL.

[Antoche]

So 8bits textures are just a waste of time and color depth. I thought they were faster fot 3d cards rather than 24bpp textures...

my perception was that 8bit textures were good for saving memory, and weren't that much slower to display, probably a negligible difference - because the colortable is loaded into the GPU's memory, so i guess it depends on the card's handling of that

[arekkusu]

There is some bad information above.

OpenGL does support 8 bit textures natively-- you can use GL_ALPHA or GL_LUMINANCE for greyscale textures (masks, or height maps for example.)

But you are asking about 8 bit color paletted textures. These are (inexplicably) not supported by native OpenGL. You can convert your 8bit texture to 24bit RGB or 32bit RGBA when you upload it to the GPU during glTexImage2D() by specifying the appropriate format and internal formats. Go read the man page.

Now, since they are a very useful idea, there are extensions for real paletted textures GL_EXT_paletted_texture and GL_EXT_shared_texture_palette. However they only seem to be implemented by nvidia, not ATI, so they aren't of much use in a real-world application.

You can also use glPixelMap for some on the fly palette conversion, but this is terribly slow. Or, on very recent cards, you can write a fragment program to do texture lookups with colorization.

I have an nvidia card - how do I use these extensions in my code?

As for every extension, read the offical docs at the OpenGL Extension Registry :
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-samp...ed_texture.txt

[dorbie]

8bit textures used to be commonly supported with the palette extension to save bandwidth and memory, but this has been deprecated. DO NOT USE IT. Some of the best new hardware does not support it.

To save bandwidth and space today the best approach is to use the compressed texture formats supported in hardware.

Read this for info on how to do this:
http://developer.nvidia.com/attach/1506

[Deiussum]

Your forgetting another good reason for paletted textures... The age-old art of palette animation... That is... animating an image simply by changing the color of an entry in the palette.