> I've only heard one implementor opine that a driver would be more
> difficult to implement due to GetProcAddress returning context
> independent pointers. As another implementor, I don't agree.
A lot of discussion here has been on the side of the driver-writer. As
an application developer interested in multi-head OpenGL applications,
I'm wondering what would happen in a (contrived) scenario like this:
I have two graphics accelerators installed. The "main" one is a typical
AGP 2D/3D card like the TNT2 or a Diamond FireGL 1. It can do
1280x1024x32 with 32-bit Z and 8-bit stencil. My second head is attached
to a PCI-based board that can do 1600x1200x64 (16-bits per component)
with a 21-bit log Z and 8-bit stencil, plus it can do multitexture and
some other extensions.
My application is smart enough to put the typical controls on the
"typical" card, and the fancy super-high-res deep-pixel image processing
windows on the "fancy" card. Naturally I'm interested in whatever
extensions are present in the fancy card such as MultiTexture and the
future SeparateAlphaBlendMode extension.
Since I have these different windows, I would expect to be able to get
different features/extensions from the different contexts. What would
happen when I query the extensions with context-independent function
pointers? Assuming I get a pointer, what happens when I call it?
Sorry for the long-winded example. :-)
--
Paul T. Miller | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Principal Engineer | Softimage Graphics and Effects Software Group
Avid Technology, Inc. | Opinions expressed here are my own.
