Texture unit number difference

I am using a NV5700U, when I query for the max texture units supported with GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS_ARB, I get 4. But in the DX Caps Viewer, it says MaxSimultaneousTextures is 8. I wonder if these two things actually have different meanings. If not, why I get different results in opengl and DX?

afaik more texture units are still available but only using programmable pipeline
ie fragment shaders/programs
they want to support the use of shaders which makes the texture stuff more effecient or so… dont know exactly why

What you asked under OpenGL, will give you the number of REAL texture units, meaning, that you also get texture-coordinates etc.

If you use a fragment shader, you can usually use more textures, than you have texture units. You only get 4 texture coordinates, which you can interpolate, but usually you only need one texture coordinate or two, to access every texture.

Under OpenGL you can ask for GL_MAX_IMAGE_UNITS or so, which should give you the same number, which you get under DX.

Check out the fragment program spec, there you should find all necessary information.

Jan.

just to correct a minor typo, it’s glGetIntegerv with

total number of texture images:
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS_ARB

and while i’m at it …

total number of texture coordinate sets:
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_COORDS_ARB

total number of texture units complete with matrix and environment function:
GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS

note that you can only enable/disable units up to GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS. units from GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS to GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS_ARB are always enabled.

as jan said, it’s all in the spec:
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/spec.html

you just have to dig for it :wink:

by the way, only d3d9 imposes the limit of 8. on fx hardware, you have 16 total image units with gl, 4 texture units, and 8 coordinate sets.