Unfortunaly I don’t have a time to test it out myself, but I need this information to feed some thoughts, so it would be nice if someone who used this extensions (WGL or GLX style) could contribute to an answer
With this extension, we can read from one and write to another buffer (DC or drawable) in the same context. But is it possible to bind the same buffer to different context at the same time (in different threads)? I want to render to an offscreen buffer and transfer the final image to a window using glCopyPixels, but I don’t want to do any context changes. I thought maybe that I can render to a pbuffer in one thread with one context and then copy the image to another one in the second thread. Would it be possible (and fast?) ?
Well, to be frank, I think of an 3d API of my own, so to speak “OpenGL 3.0” - for fun and self-educational reasons It should work on the top of the OpenGL and provide fully flexible pipeline(from batch setup to fragments etc.) using compact functional shading language. The problem is the window system implementation. I want to make it like current FBO: you create a bunch of buffers and bind them to a framebuffer, teh framebuffer can then be bound to a window or to a texture, but exists separately from it. So I considered implementing the framebuffers as pbuffers and copy the final image to the window using a “dummy” context. the *_make_current_read sounds just like what I need, but I would like to avoid the context change (so to render to a buffer while it is readonly-bound to an rc in another thread). Of course, when ARB_framebuffer_object_blit ( + multisample) will be implemented, I won’t need any pbuffers, but it will take time.
