nVidia Extension Questions

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?

I think you mean vertex programs, but yeah, that’s my understanding of them. I hope someone can straighten us both out on those, cuz they do look nifty

Come on, I think it’s a valid question. If not a real reply, at least gimme some flames so I know people are reading it!

You have to aks your question more precisely: first of all what particular extension are you referring to? Or if you don’t know that ask what do you want to do exactly?

Regards,
-Lev