Quote Originally Posted by bridgman View Post
With every passing hour I think of another possible way to interpret your question

When you say "have to go through OpenGL" are you using OpenGL for most of the drawing (ie you want to go *around* OpenGL to update textures but then keep drawing with OpenGL and the updated textures) or are you asking if you can program the 3D hardware directly and do cool texture update things without using OpenGL at all ?

If the former, previous answer stands (you can do it but you need some API extensions in OpenGL to deal with things like establishing addressibility and cache flushing to pick up the new contents from memory).

If the latter, the answer is "yes", but you'd probably want to implement some kind of 3D API yourself anyways.
I geuss the real question is, how much abstraction can be removed from every level of the stack to increase performance without burdening developers. The old adage, clock cycles are cheaper then developer man hours.

I know D#D in its many incarnations has started to become very problematic performance wise. I often ponder the wisdom of gallium3d doing so many code transformations etc. I geuss what needs to come out, is a way to get as close to the metal as can be achieved, which in my mind would mean making a kernel/compiler right into the hardware "as a hardware feature" and make it intellegent enough that drivers would become nearly obsolete.

buts thats just a pipe dream anyways