[quote name='SteveDeFacto' timestamp='1313544473' post='4850102']
I have a texture which I render to with a frame buffer. My scene is completely drawn before I copy it to the back buffer. Factually this texture acts in every way shape or form as a back buffer. The back buffer on my window is simply an unnecessary extra step I have to go through to get it to the front buffer...
Based on your other thread your frame buffer is using a different format. So if there was any way to do what you want, you'd probably get this:
Front Buffer: Format X
Frame Buffer: Format Y
Screen: Reading Buffer, expecting Format X
You: Swap pointers to Front and Frame Buffer
Screen: Getting Format Y -> displaying garbage
You worries about performance are also pointless, because buffer swapping is likely to just swap pointers (and as such has basically no overhead), there is absolutely no difference between copying your stuff to the front or back buffer (except that one of these will cause ugly tearing). Not to mention that unless your frame rendering takes exactly 1/hz ms, you will have to wait for the display to be ready anyway, so you are literally not going to lose a nanosecond. On top of that, drivers allow to render a few frames ahead, so unlike any manual attempt they might not even block when swapping and can therefore be potentially _faster_ than whatever you're trying to do (unless you're constantly below 1/hz in which case you don't have any performance issues anyway).
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When I asked this question I had already rendered my scene directly to the front buffer and it works fine other than the lack of vsync. The format of the texture does not matter since I render it to the front buffer with a quad. Also I think you are right about it just swapping the pointers for the front and back buffers. In that case there is really no loss in speed however it's still wasted video memory but I'm not too concerned about that.