this really isn’t OpenGL related…
but since teh gamecube api is supposed to be so close to the opengl api…
i thought i might as well drop it here…
with the xbox games…
we are seeing a lot of games using stenciled shadow volumes (which looks horrible in most games), but on the gamecube…
it looks like we are seeing a lot game using some sort of render to texure shadow algorihms…
the shadows aren’t sharp for say like a ssv but there not really to aliased like the shadow maps we see and do on the pc…
and when we want better looking shadow maps…
framerate crawls pretty quick…
i’m just curiuos, but between the 2 systems…
what’s supposed to be faster on the render to texture operations?
If switching between two render targets/contexts is “not too slow” then you can get fairly good textured shadows in your world, by rendering your geometry sorted on distance-from-light (closest first) first into the world, then into the shadow texture.
Perhaps the GC hardware optimizes the render context switch operation? That would be cool.
its pure and simple: one memory for everything, all accessable from everything… render to texture is the same like render to screen there… and formats are the same, too all the time… and like that there manipulating / creating textures directly is very fast and very simple… in fact its just something like this:
uchar* texture = new uchar[ width * height * bpp ];
gcBindTexture( GC_TEXTURE0_NIN, texture );
( ok, thats very very freestyle and fully hypotetic, but think bout it… i want that the next geforce/ati/whatever uses the same memory like the rest of the pc ( DDR on athlons 
) cause then you can do much stuff you cant currently… )