just following the recently released ARBvbo extension, I was wondering if ARBpbo was actually under development.
I started playing a little with animated procedural textures. Obviously, I soon ran into the well-known texture update bottleneck (TexSubImage2D is not exactly a panacea). I would love to get the ability to stream texture data directly into server side memory. Kind of what NVpixel_data_range allows, but in a cleaner, non-proprietary way.
possibly never, but instead a full ARB_buffer_object will come, replacing textures,vertexarrays,indexarrays and all completely… see überbuffers/superbuffer plans…
but i think for the rest, it should come rather quick. but of course they have to match it against full opengl, wich can get rather complicated… thinking of how much is related with textures, render targets, pixels in general…
I doubt that the Super-buffers will replace textures or even VBO. After all, for a simple texture that is meant to be used as a simple image map, it’s much easier to just upload it with glTexture2D.
I see Super-buffers as the means of either doing render-to-texture ops or for dealing with issues of taking one type of buffer and using it as another (render to vertex array, for example).