How many stencil buffer bits?
BlitzMax Forums/OpenGL Module/How many stencil buffer bits?
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| Does anyone know or have reference to statistics as to how commonplace support for an 8-bit stencil buffer is? Is it truly safe to say that everyone whose system supports a stencil buffer will have at least an 8-bit buffer? I know the OpenGL spec is only a 1-bit stencil as minimum. I also know that most video buffers use a 24-bit depth buffer combined with an extra byte for the stencil, making them typically 8-bit. But is this widespread? If I write an app which uses individual stencil bits and needs to use 8 of them at once, on how many machines is it going to fail? |
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| It looks like 8-bit is pretty common since very old hardware. |
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| At least since GMA 900 for sure. Unsure about cards that are older or DX8 targeted as the S3 / SiS that still float around in some cases. though for those it does not make a difference anyway as they are granted to have enough problems with opengl as such already and with stencil buffers on their own performance wise :) Anything thats performance wise able to handle stencil buffers and OpenGL should support 8bit ones |
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| Thanks for the information, good to know. I will go with the 8-bit then.. I am relying on there being 8 bits so that I can use each bit individually. |
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