EDIT!
1.3 is avaivable for download. It’s the last build of the 1.X series. It should be stable and bugless.
Eirik Hoem
We have released a public stable version of the OpenGL Shader Designer. It’s a IDE for developing vertex and fragment shaders in glsl. We have been working very hard on this for the last few weeks, and we are very happy with the result. We have decided to release it as freeware to support the OpenGL community.
The current version is also avaivable. It’s unstable, but has lots of new features. Also included are a series of tutorials on glsl.
The new 1.3 release is a vast improvement over 1.1. Everything works smoothly on my 5900U using the 60.72 drivers.
I would like to see support for orthographic projection and although its unlikely that I will ever need it, I would like to see support for more than four texture units.
Is not a bug, the GF FX5900 has only 4 texture units ( http://www.delphi3d.net/hardware/viewreport.php?report=766 Multitexture Texture units 4). The Shader Designer takes all valaible texture units, this is right (in my card, 3dlabs VP, I have 8 TU, and the SD shows me 8 TU). When glsl supports binding to texture objects instead of binding to texture units, all of us could use more textures than TU we have (nearly in the future, said by Randi Rost)
AFAIK GeForce FX series only support 4 TUs if you use ARB_multitexture. If you use fragment programs/shaders you are able to access up to 16 texture units.
I dont know if there are any way to use more textures than the number of texture units using GLSL, but I don’t think so. I think that we must wait until glsl will bind texture objects instead of texture units to see removed this limitation.
I didn’t tried it yet but I think it is possible. You don’t have to enable textureing at the texture units. You only have to bind the textures to the texture units.
glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0 + 12);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, my_tex);
//glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D); <--- there is no need to do that
Hmmm, apparently that works fine, but I’ve tested with only one texture. I’ll do some tests, check the GL_MAX defines for textures in vs/fs, and if this is viable, I’ll fix the Shader Designer.
Thanks for the tip
In the “issues” section of ARB fragment program spec lies the answer to the question. A texture unit consists of a standard TMU like resource, texgen, texture matrix and texture state. That is, if the MAX returns N then the card is capable of having N independent sets. The issue (#6 I think) states that “Texture Unit” should be deprecated in favor of “Texture Image Unit” for describing the unit that determines the number of independent textures that a card can handle at the same time.
Apparently this means that the 59xx series really does allow 16 textures, according to glinfo. There is no doubt that the 68xx series supports 16.
On the other hand, the separation of texture image units from texture state and other texture attributes means that you may have to look at multiple values to determine exactly how many dialog controls to show.
Originally posted by Ffelagund: When glsl supports binding to texture objects instead of binding to texture units, all of us could use more textures than TU we have (nearly in the future, said by Randi Rost)
Will GLSL get support for binding to texture objects or will there still be the binding to texture unit in future?