OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Versions 3.0 and 3.1, Seventh Edition

Appendix J. Floating-Point Formats for Textures, Framebuffers, and Renderbuffers

This appendix will describe the floating-point formats used for pixel storage in framebuffers and renderbuffers, and texel storage in textures. It has the following major sections:

• “Floating-Point Formats Used in OpenGL”

Floating-Point Formats Used in OpenGL

In addition to the normal 32-bit single-precision floating-point values you are used to using when you declare a GLfloat in your application, OpenGL supports reduced-precision floating-point representations for storing data more compactly than its 32-bit representation. In many instances, your floating-point data may not require the entire dynamic range of a 32-bit float, and storing or ...