OpenGL: Post-Processing + Multisampling =?

Question

I'm fairly new to OpenGL and trying to figure out how to add a post-processing stage to my scene rendering. What I believe I know so far is that I create an FBO, render the scene to that, and then I can render to the back buffer using my post-processing shader with the texture from the FBO as the input.

But where this goes beyond my knowledge is when multisampling gets thrown in. The FBO must be multisampled. That leaves two possibilities: 1. the post-process shader operates 1:1 on subsamples to generate the final multisampled screen output, or 2. the shader must resolve the multiple samples and output a single screen fragment for each screen pixel. How can these be done?

Answer 1

Well, option 1 is supported in the GL via the features braught in via GL_ARB_texture_multisample (in core since GL 3.2). Basically, this brings new multisample texture types, and the corresponding samplers like sampler2DMS, where you explicitely can fetch from a particular sample index. If this approach can be efficiently used to implement your post-processing effect, I don't know.

Option 2 is a little bit different than what you describe. Not the shader will do the multisample resolve. You can render into a multisample FBO (don't need a texture for that, a renderbuffer will do as well) and do the resolve explicitely using glBlitFramebuffer, into another, non-multisampled FBO (this time, with a texture). This non-multisamples texture can then be used as input for the post-processing. And neither the post-processing nor the default framebuffer need to be aware of multisampling at all.