npot textures

OpenGL will raise an error, and texturing will be disabled on the affected unit (all accesses to it will result in a white colour).

NPoT - Sin.

Yes, some hardware supports it, but I spend a lot of my week at work whipping artists for putting silly sized textures into game. I hate them with a passion, that is NPoT textures, not the artists [smile].

In a previous game (hobbyist one) I worked on we had a few NPoT textures as I just chose to not care out of ease, and on cards that didn't support it (partially due to poor error handling), they were just all white and didn't show correctly. Not to say this is the default behaviour of all cards, probably more to my renderer's pipeline than anything else.

consider using texture rectangles "GL_ARB_texture_rectangle" it was intruduced earlier than NPOT textures, so older hardware may have support for that kind of extension.

Okay, here's what i've found yesterday, using:

glPixelStorei(GL_UNPACK_ALIGNMENT, 1);

...u can load textures of any size, if you're OpenGL support it.
No more crash! No code change...

Hmm, I guess the default value for UNPACK_ALIGNMENT of 4 has caused a lot of grief over the years...

Does anyone know if the word alignment actually provides better performance in practice with modern hardware or is just historical/theoretical? I once tried a few quick benchmarks but could never show that aligning data to word boundaries was faster.