New OpenGL Extension: EXT_packed_depth_stencil
Posted by Kaya Kupferschmidt • Thursday, October 27. 2005 • Category: OpenGL
A new OpenGL specification for an extension has been finished by the "ARB superbuffers workgroup". The new extension called EXT_packed_depth_stencil is about a hardware-native format that handeles the depth-buffer and stencil buffer in one interleaved buffer. This extension allows to read from/write to such an combined depth/stencil buffer with one function call instead of two plus no conversion of the data is needed any more, which in turn should speed up such operations. Plus this new packed data format can be used together with the EXT_framebuffer_object extension which allows an application to render directly to a texture.
Currently I don't need this extension myself, but it is important to all those people out there who wanted to render to a texture using the stencil buffer - this was not possible on many consumer level graphics cards due to the lack of an appropriate render target format.
Currently I don't need this extension myself, but it is important to all those people out there who wanted to render to a texture using the stencil buffer - this was not possible on many consumer level graphics cards due to the lack of an appropriate render target format.
