Working with the GPU

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

How do I pull off full screen antialiasing with GL? I would like to do it through hardware. My initial thought was to look at the stencil buffer (or the frame buffer, whichever one stores the FINAL image put to the screen), and modify it based on a simple antialiasing algorithm I put together. However after thinking for a little bit I realized that that would be software calculated FSAA and not cool.

I seem to be confused on how to get effects processed by the GPU. How does my compiler know what I want to be done by the GPU and what needs to be done by the CPU?

My teacher said that it was a very hardware specific process, however there has to be a better way. Thanks

2

Depending on the card, you can use WGL_ARB_multisample to control the FSAA, but it doesn’t work on all cards (mostly the newer cards, GeForce3+, Radeon 9500+, and a few others).

3

If your video card supports it there’s the ARB_multisample extension. . . I’ve never used it, myself, though.

EDIT: Doh! By a couple seconds. . .

[This message has been edited by Ostsol (edited 05-16-2003).]

4

Do either of you guys have a link to where I can find out more?

5

http://www.area3d.net/file.php?filename=nitrogl/base.c

It supports the multisample extension (I wrote it awhile ago, and it’s kind of out of data compared to my current base code).

6

Its kindof hard to understand your code, isn’t there any documentation on this whole ARB business?

7

The specs:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/index.html