3d texture question & improvements

[mahogny]

Hello,
I'm working on a new voxel renderer using 3d texturing (for the curious: www.endrov.net). now, it's quite a bit of texture data so:

* has anyone written a texturerenderer equivalent for 3d? I'm very pleased with the 2d performance (gained 4x over a normal texture upload)
* is it possible to upload the texture asynchronously with the JOGL binding and if so, anyone got some code lying around to get it right? it seems FBOs might(?) be able to pull something like this off but how does it mix with threads in java?
* has anyone benchmarked what is the optimal size of the 3d texture? I can split it up everything into smaller cubes if it helps. I thought of doing this anyway for progressive loading.

thanks

[cylab]

* has anyone written a texturerenderer equivalent for 3d? I'm very pleased with the 2d performance (gained 4x over a normal texture upload)

The NVidia OpenGL SDK 10 contains an example: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10/opengl/samples.html

* is it possible to upload the texture asynchronously with the JOGL binding and if so, anyone got some code lying around to get it right? it seems FBOs might(?) be able to pull something like this off but how does it mix with threads in java?

This could be difficult. Afaik GFX card drivers tend to be less robust when opengl commands are sent from different threads, so jogls threading model is limiting the opengl calls to the AWT event thread. The best thing I can think of is using glTexImage and update only chunks of the texture in the normal display() callback.

[Chris61182]

* has anyone benchmarked what is the optimal size of the 3d texture? I can split it up everything into smaller cubes if it helps. I thought of doing this anyway for progressive loading.

I don't have any benchmarks but given how modern GPUs work, odds are you won't see any performance fall off until you run out of memory on the board. After that you are completely at the mercy of the drivers and their eviction policy (MRU, LRU, etc...).