I have a few questions about nVidia’s extensions that I couldn’t find an answer for on nVidia’s site or on the forum here.
First of all, I’m still a bit hazy as to what vertex and pixel shaders are… could I say, write a vertex shader that I could enable then call…
glBegin(GL_POINTS);
//lots of vertices here
glEnd();
…and each vertex would be drawn as a special particle image instead of the default, well, point? My understanding is… well, yes, but I’m just not sure and haven’t played with it yet. I paged through the different demos in the nVSDK and some of them look really cool; I’m already getting ideas that I’d like to look into when I start researching these.
Second of all, what’s the purpose of the function that allocates memory? I can’t remember what it’s called, but I’ve seen it mentioned on this forum. glAlloc_nv or something? Does it reserve video memory or grab a block similar to new/malloc? Why would you want to do this, doesn’t the driver automatically put textures and whatnot where they should be?