GLX compatible pixelformats

[Roderick Colenbrander]

Hi,

For some time I have been rewriting Wine's Opengl32 layer. Right now I'm 
fixing our pbuffer code and because of that I have a question about GLX 
pixelformats.

First a little Wine background. Windows programs use GDI  in combination with 
a display driver for rendering. Wine contains a X11 driver for rendering. Due 
to various limitations of Wiine's X11 driver we are limited to a single X 
Visual. This visual is created at 'startup' and is GLX compatible (we try to 
find a RGBA format with double buffering, 8bit alpha, 8bit stencil ).

For most OpenGL programs this single pixel format isn't a very big limitation 
as on Windows programs aren't guaranteed to get what they want anyway. If 
they ask a 32bit format they can in theory get a 8bit format back, so it is 
normal to verify what you got.

The problem lies in pbuffers in which case the pixel format requirements are a 
bit more strict. The functions which programmers use are similar to 
glXGetFBConfigs and friends which searches for formats which meet you 
requirements. In general programs expect to get atleast one format back.

Our issue is that we want to advertise as much 'compatible' pixelformats as 
possible (also for things like multisampling and more). I wrote a small test 
app which created a pixmap/pbuffer and checked for each format if it was 
compatible with the format of the GLX Context (I created a context which met 
the same requirements as I mentioned for Wine)

I got about a dozen of 'compatible' formats with similar R/G/B/A, depth and 
perhaps other things in common. I tried the same program (both using a 
direct/indirect rendering context) on the radeon dri drivers (rv250) and 
using the fglrx drivers. Further users of different cards tried it too.
In case of pixmaps it found at most one compatible format and the pbuffers 
test failed (most drivers don't support pbuffers).

Based on my nvidia tests I expected to find a few compatible formats. Are 
there some heuristics which I can use for finding compatible formats (without 
testing)? What's the best way on how to do this? What's the definition of 
compatible? (the specs are vague)

Regards,
Roderick Colenbrander