Correct glTexImage2D usage -ATI bug?

What is the correct result from passing GL_RGB (or 3) as the internalFormat parameter in glTexImage2D?

I pass in 8-bit RGB data (with GL_RGB as the internal format) when generating a normalization cube-map and the resulting cube map has horrible banding artifacts. (see the ATI demo at http://www.ati.com/developer/sdk/RadeonSDK/Html/Samples/OpenGL/RADEONCombine3SpecMap.html for a similar artifact)

Now if I pass RGB8 to specify the internal format in glTexImage2D the banding disappears.

(In the ATI demo, change the six lines at line no. ~938 in RadeonCombiner3SpecMap.cpp
glTexImage2D(…, 0, 3,…) to
glTexImage2D(…, 0, GL_RGB8,…)

and the banding artifacts disappear also)

Now I thought that when you specify GL_RGB (or 3) that the driver was to select the most appropiate internal format for the data passed in (as long as it had R,G and B components)

So is this a ATI driver bug or am I reading the spec incorrectly?

Remember, it’s not a bug… it’s a “feature”.

Seriously, i don’t see where the problem is. When you specifiy GL_RGB or 3 as the internal format, you basically say to the driver “i don’t care”. And when the driver don’t cares, i’m guessing it’s using 16-bits textures to reduce the texture memory usage and increase the performances. I might be wrong, but i think it’s the same on NVidia’s.

Y.

I guess that’s where the wonderful display properties panel comes in : the “texture quality” slider could control how the driver stores textures that are specified with a loose format (ie a format that does not specify a bit count per chanel).

It might be possible to query the internal format,

glGetTexLevelParameterfv(bla bla bla)

not sure if it returns the actual internal format but try it.

perhaps they’re using R5G6B5 (or RGB5) textures when u call it with RGB.
this is correct behaviour! (they only have to be close)
nvidia cards will also do the same if you have a 16bit window ie give u RGB5 if u ask for RGB

OK, I’m convinced, I’ll specify the bit-precision of internal formats that I need from now on.
(It just seemed strange that ATI have a demo that does not work correctly with default settings - Guess I’m just letting off steam as this “bug” took forever to track down)