[java] VolatileImage question

It depends on OS. In Linux just about anything and everything is graphically accelerated even normal images, in Windows only drawing lines that are completely horizontal/vertical and drawing images are graphically accelerated, in Apple's OSs I have no clue.

Because volatile images should only exist in VRAM it'd be interesting to see what the Windows JVM does with it.

But you will notice massive FPS gains if drawing was what was slowing you down IE from 60 FPS up to 100+. That's from someone else's mouth though from http://www.javagaming.org (no I don't remember the post it was in).

My problem is that I need to modify this particular Image at a pixel level. That is the main reason why I decided to use BufferedImage's in the first place. Is there any way to get hardware support when rendering an image at a pixel level?

If you don't do anything to Buffered Images that would require the processor to work on them AND they are a compatible format (GraphicsEnvironment.createCompatibleGraphics or similar, not using new or File.IO). They should eventually end up on the video card especially if you're just drawing the image on the screen.


Granted I can't say I know that for sure or have tested it myself, it's just from reading books and random forums. It's annoying for me to say that but I've focused almost entirely on the business side and am just recently seriously looking at games.

Thanks for the input anemian. If it is any help to display my situation more fully I will post some source code.

The following code draws a translucent masking image (BufferedImage of type ARGB), using a particular 2-dimensional array that holds the data of the images height-map. The code renders a light value to each pixel using BufferedImage.setRGB() in the masking (BufferedImage img) bufferedImage.
This masking image is then drawn over the actual image, producing a normal mapped surface.



The effect produced, is as such.



So I would really like to know if there is any way of producing this effect with hardware acceleration/support. My main goal is to get it so that the graphics card handles all heavy rendering operations such as this.

Please help!

Sounds like what you are looking for is shaders.
Look up GLSL, HLSL, or CG shaders. You can do all sorts of heavy texture manipulation on the pixel level inside a shader. And on the plus side, it only happens for visible pixels (which don't need to 1:1 correspond with texture pixels.)
I know there is a OpenGL API in java, but depending on your application target, you'd have to check if it is available(sorry I don't do much Java stuff, was just trolling the active topics)

I suggest you check out Slick2D:
http://slick.cokeandcode.com/index.php

It uses OpenGL as it's back-end, though it doesn't support shaders now you could request it as a feature :)

I wish this stuff was easier to understand. Here are links to all the stuff I've read when I was trying to figure this out. There is a lot of information.

BufferedImage as Good as Butter
BufferedImage as Good as Butter, Part II
VolatileImage: Now you See it, Now you Don't
VolatileImage Q&A
ToolkitBufferedVolatileManagedImage Strategies

Another thing you could try is not setting the pixel using setRGB(). If you have an image of 256x256, that's 65536 function calls, which is slow.

Use the following code to get the pixel data...



Enjoy!

Thanks for the awesome replies guys. I really feel like I'm beginning to know were I am going now.

thanks for the insight, Momoko_Fan and KulSeran,
For some reason I was under the impression that I would be able to simply add some code that would allow my java code to be run by a GPU. I realize now that GPU's support their own language's.. kind of a lame revelation on my part.
Anyways thanks for helping me realize this.

to Glass_Knife,
I have to say that you have been pretty helpful in the number of replies you have contributed to my threads, so thanks for that. Also thanks for the nifty code for RGB retrieval. I actually had already started searching for a more efficient way of pixel manipulation, through RGB integer manipulation of rasters. It's kind of silly how inefficient getRGB() and setRGB() really are.

Thanks all.. and hopefully next time I post, Ill be putting up an announcement about how I have been able to use this to add to my game project. If your interested, check it out.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=516788

Merry Christmas!