I am unable to render anything. I checked to see if the extension was supported and it does not appear to be supported. How do games like Half Life 2 do multi sampling if it's not supported by my hardware? I assume there must be a trick to do it without hardware support?
How do games like Half Life 2 do multi sampling if it's not supported by my hardware?
Create a multi-sampled framebuffer object (Using ARB Framebuffer). Render into it. Resolve (i.e. downsample). Use the resulting colour texture to draw a fullscreen textured quad.
Your hardware does support multisampling, and you should see GL_ARB_multisample in the extensions string. Support for any OpenGL version of 1.3 or later also implies support for multisampling even if the extensions string doesn't show it.
[quote name='SteveDeFacto' timestamp='1313304213' post='4848871'] How do games like Half Life 2 do multi sampling if it's not supported by my hardware?
Create a multi-sampled framebuffer object (Using ARB Framebuffer). Render into it. Resolve (i.e. downsample). Use the resulting colour texture to draw a fullscreen textured quad.
[/quote]
Hi, I've long since resolved this issue though your reply sounds like there may be a more direct way then what I am doing. Right now I have two frame buffers, one for multisample rendering, and one for texture rendering. I blit the image from the multisample FBO to the texture FBO so I can use that one to render to a texture. Is there a way I can get a texture from the multisample FBO without needing to copy it to another frame buffer? It would allow me to cut one extra step from my rendering pipeline.