Bitmap objects

[john]

okay, with all the furore over opengl's apparant lack of 2D support (bullsh<coughcough> ), I was thinking about an extension to the pixel copy functions.

One of the main critisisms of glCopyPixels seems to be the need to recopy the bitmap across the bus every frame. In the same sense that textures can be stored on the video card to prevent this problem for texture mapping, why not make bitmap objects to allow the programmer to transfer a bitmap once, and reuse it?

for example

glBindBitmap(bmp.id);
glTransferPixels(bmp.img);

...

glBindBitmap(bmp.id);
glRasterpos2i(0,0);
glBlitPixels();

or something???

cheers
John

[Humus]

I think that an extension for non power of 2 textures would be a better solution since it solves this problem but is very useful in 3d too. There is also already hardware which support this (eg Matrox G400).

[john]

there are very good reasons why textures are a power of two. think about it... computers count in binary... binary increments in powers of two... niiiiice optimisation potential