Re: (Resolved) RE: Weird OpenGL/GLU problem

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Mads Bondo Dydensborg wrote:

> What surprises me is that the glut function to render a series of letters
> would be such a performance hitter. I will have to investigate how other
> games writes strings to an opengl context. The way I am doing it is
> clearly not good enough.

GLUT's raster fonts use glDrawPixels - which is *HIDEOUSLY* slow on
all current PC hardware.  Even on machines like SGI workstations that
have hardware accellerated drawpixels, it's slow because you transfer
the bitmap over to the hardware every frame for every letter...even if
you draw the same letter several times over.

The *only* route to speed on HARDWARE OpenGL is to draw text with
textured polygons.

PLIB has a library to make that easy. http://plib.sourceforge.net/fnt,
and the PLIB examples suite contains a dozen or so suitable texture
maps.

Also, I wrote a FAQ on the subject of drawing text in OpenGL:

     http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1/opengl_text.html

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)

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