OpenGL GUI

[quote]Having to redraw something of that complexity every frame would be high impact.
[/quote]
I think not; I fully believe I could render that same GUI at well over 100fps on ordinary hardware, redrawing the lot every frame, without even tickling the CPU. Most of it is just sprites over a bitmap! If you break it down into its constituent bits it’s really not so complicated at all.

Cas :slight_smile:

Now render X of them (10+) and a 3D engine frame (+ conceivably adding any advanced rendering that I hinted at). Being able to splat up a quad for a GUI window that hasn’t changed seems very reasonable when the overhead is really 2X the use of texture memory per window. The actual back end code is not exceedingly more complex than rendering the entire GUI per frame.

With complex GUIs like the one I pointed to you conceivably will eat up a bunch of texture memory storing all of the necessary individual bitmaps anyway.