OpenGL 8 bit alpha texture format

0
votes

I have a greyscale 8-bit bitmap which I am going to use as a mask for font glyph rendering. The bitmap pixels are just an alpha value. I'm wondering whether it's better to convert this to RGBA, or whether I can use a format like GL_ALPHA8_EXT, which I cannot seem to find any documentation for anywhere, although I can see it in glext.h.

Is GL_ALPHA8_EXT widely supported?

1
openglformattextures
What was wrong with regular 'ole GL_ALPHA8? - genpfault

1 Answers

1
votes

Yes, GL_ALPHA8 is supported, i'm using it on desktop and iOS. Actually i've never heard of GL_ALPHA8_EXT and a quick research shows that it is part of the EXT_texture extension which is supported by actually all graphic cards i know and should be the same like GL_ALPHA8.