probably be cause no graphics card natively supports operations on doubles, they all use floating point value internally (as does the GLSL)

You don't need a precision like double for, say materials. I don't think you would see the difference.
Also, if I'm correct, floats are faster than doubles in general.

Well, for glInterleavedArrays there aro no double formats too... while it's possible to use glVertexd instead of glVertexf... mah... Because of this I decided to use floats instead of doubles :P

Quote:Original post by Drag0n

WanMaster: Sure, I don't need the extra precision (at least not for materials and lighting). But there are double-variants of virtually all OpenGL functions, why not for materials and lighting? ;)

Drag0n

WanMaster, there are double-variants of virtually all OpenGL functions to simplify using your data structures. This is so that you do not have to explicitly convert your data structures. There are lots of situations where you need double precision, for example, game physics, and it is convenient that values from that can be used directly. However the above posts are correct that no video cards support double precision, and therefore several OpenGL commands will not accept doubles...basically anything that involves more than one data element (textures, vertex arrays).

So why no doubles for materials...they could be converted to floats internally...But the thing is you probably don't calculate material properties dynamically. You load them as part of your model...so it kind of makes sense that you'd start out with floats and never need to use doubles.

All philosophical though... :-)