One of the only things that I don''t like about OpenGL is that annoying power-of-two, 256x256 texture limitation...What gives with that, anyhow? Why exactly is there such a limitation? I imagine it has something to do with efficiency of texture memory storage and/or transfer...But it still seems somewhat rediculous. The main issue I''d like to understand how to address is that of overcoming these limitations. How does one do this? When left to my own imagination, I considered some sort of funky routine that involves breaking a large or non-uniform image up into chunks, and peicing those image chunks appropriately onto the geometry as you wish them to appear...Though the idea of trying to figure out such an algorithm gives me a headache. Is there a much easier way? Possibly even one built into OpenGL? A coder friend of mine seems to be loading in a 1024x768 image without even knowing how he''s doing it, and the idea that he accidentally stumbled on a solution astonishes me. Maybe he got some bitmap loading routine from somewhere that automatically solves this problem, I don''t know... Anyways, this would clear up a large stumbling block, and allow me (and anyone else reading this who''s wondering) to make everything look so much better with high-resolution textures. That, and I wouldn''t have to re-size textures for some md2 files to load in my program, heh...I always thought that was annoying... So please help me! How do I overcome...OpenGL''s Insidious Texture Limitations?!? Thank you for your time. - Bucket - Hai, watashi no chichi no kuruma ga oishikatta desu! ...or, in other words, "Yes, my dad''s car was deliscious!"

Anonymous poster is right.

AFAIK power of two limitation in hardware is to avoid page break and reduce computations for texture mapping.


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

You can use any size, but some cards don''t support that. You should stick with powers of two for compatibility.

The resons powers of two are used are so that a pixel can be found quickly by using bitshifting, ie, a pixel in a 32 bit 256x256 texture can be found with x<<2+y<<10 and the next 4 bytes are the colour. Bitshifting is faster than multiplying.

Breaking up the objects is probably the only way to do it, unless the texture is a pattern.

only the voodoo1/2/3 and some other early noname cards have this limitation my vanta(tnt2) can handle 2048x2048 textures. either as ppl have said break the texture up or rescale the image. u can use gluBuildMipmaps(..) to do this

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