Fast 2D in gl? How did mark do it?

How did mark get 2d working so fast in gl without using texture quads? Or did he?

Because one thing I've come to accept in using gl, is glDrawPixels etc are very slow, and it's almost universally accepted on every site/forum from here to yada yada that the only realistically fast method of doing 2d in gl is to fake it using quads.

The problem obviously being that you're then limited to power of 2 sided textures.


Solve my mystery.

I think he uses texture quads, but don't quote me on it.

* wonders if fast alpha/rotate/scale in 2d is being saved till a later date...

I don't think it's quads, otherwise images would be limited to the power of 2(If not in use, at least in memory usage, even better older cards like voodoo5 only support power of 2 textures)

more I look into it,
I think he's using either the pbuffer or pixel_buffer_objects...

You are not forced to have power of 2 textures. You can load them and add borders to it up to the next power of 2, then scale the quad and set up the UV correctly.

From the versions.txt file:
"OpenGL driver is currently very simple: one tex-per-graphic, no max tex size checking etc. No pbuffers
or render-to-texture, so rendering to offscreen buffers and using lockbuffer/unlockbuffer on backbuffer()
is *slow*."