Deep Color support

[Wolfgang Draxinger]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2014 18:13:04 +0300
Pekka Paalanen <ppaalanen at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Do they, really? Or does it happen on-demand, slowly RAM<->VRAM,
> causing hickups, a bit like traditional swapping RAM to disk?

The OpenGL specification doesn't define it. Drivers can implement it as
they want to.

> Especially when re-exposing we'd likely get a jerk.

Yes, this is how OpenGL works. Up to OpenGL-2.1 there used to be the
notion of "fast memory" and "texture residency". Using the API call
`glAreTexturesResident` one could query if certain texture objects
resided in fast server memory. Modern OpenGL however did away with this
concept. In fact modern GPUs are perfectly capable of swapping in only
subsets of a texture (sparse textures). OpenGL-4/Direct3D-12 class
hardware sports MMUs and texture address space is just as virtual as it
has been on CPUs for a long time. In addition to that there are
extensions for bindless texture access.


Regard,

Wolfgang