This is an ATI specific format designed for compressed normal maps,
and quite a few games check for its existence. While it is an
ATI-specific "extension" in d3d9, it is a core part of
D3D10(DXGI_FORMAT_BC5), and supported on Geforce 8 cards.
ATI cards prior to the radeon HD series did not have unconditional non
power of two support. So far we've used texture_rectangle for that, or
created a bigger power of two texture with padding. This had the
disadvantage that we had to correct the coordinates, which causes
extreme problems with shaders(doesn't work, pretty much).
Both the MacOS and the fglrx driver have support for
GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two, and run it on the hardware as long as
we stay within the texture_rectangle limitations. This allows us to
have conditional non power of two textures with normalized
coordinates. This patch adds an internal extension, and the code
creates a regular GL_TEXTURE_2D texture with NP2 size, but refuses
mipmapping, filtering and texture_rectangle incompatible
operations. This makes np2 textures work with shaders on fglrx and
macos.
For each pixel format we store a flag in the table whether it supports
post pixelshader blending. Before applying blending or during a
context switch we verify that blending is turned off for the
format. In case of R32F this gave a 5-6x performance boost (without
filtering and software conversion).
The GL_ARB_vertex_program extension does not define a standard value for
output texture coordinates. This makes problems when using vertex
shaders with fixed function fragment processing because fffp divides the
texture coords by its .w component. This means that gl shaders have to
write to the .w component of texture coords. Direct3D shaders however
do not.
OpenGL drivers do not support some low precision internal formats
like GL_RGB5 for fbo color targets. Direct3D application depend on them,
so provide a fallback format for render targets if the requested format
itself is not supported.
Stefan Dösinger