Is there a file format for pictures thats good to use with opengl? Maybe a format that stores 3 floating point numbers between 0 and 1 instead of 3 bytes for each pixel.
It'd be easy enough to make your own format, you could even build in compression with http://home19.inet.tele.dk/jibz/apack/
If you really want floating point...
http://www.idruna.com/photogenicshdr.html
http://www.idruna.com/photogenicshdr.html
Since disk access is a lot slower than memorty access instead of speeding up things you will slow down things.
Also, if for textures, todays cards normally internally use 32 bit BGRA so if you use this format you should get an speed up. Floating point for textures will only get things done slower, A LOT slower. Why BGRA instead of RGBA? Because of the stupid conversion that M$ used for bitmaps. Thus since those cards will also be normally used in windows (not all, but the mayority) the obious choice to get hardware acceleration in the Windows GUI was use BGRA internally.
Finally, some cards use S3 compression internally. Basically that means that you will save bandwind from the computer to the card. Wich is a great thing. Unfortunately that also means that it will break the quality of images (since is lossy compression). So you must check in image by image basis.
Also, if for textures, todays cards normally internally use 32 bit BGRA so if you use this format you should get an speed up. Floating point for textures will only get things done slower, A LOT slower. Why BGRA instead of RGBA? Because of the stupid conversion that M$ used for bitmaps. Thus since those cards will also be normally used in windows (not all, but the mayority) the obious choice to get hardware acceleration in the Windows GUI was use BGRA internally.
Finally, some cards use S3 compression internally. Basically that means that you will save bandwind from the computer to the card. Wich is a great thing. Unfortunately that also means that it will break the quality of images (since is lossy compression). So you must check in image by image basis.