Bit operations

hnyk · June 1, 2009, 9:46am

Hi

I was just wondering why there aren’t bit operations like bit-shift in OpenGL 2.0 ES Shading Language? Is there some architectural reason?

-hnyk

xmas · June 1, 2009, 10:14am

This restriction allows implementation of the OpenGL ES 2.0 shader pipeline on hardware which is floating point only.

hnyk · June 1, 2009, 11:52am

Okay, but if it is floating point only, how come there are still variable types like int? Or are they just floating point numbers with lower precision?

xmas · June 1, 2009, 12:13pm

The range requirements for integers are specified so that they can be implemented as floats. Having integers in the language is still useful for type checking and a few other things.