PTC is dead, long live Pixel Toaster!

Back in 1995 when i started work on the graphics library which would become PTC, you couldnt rely on a pixel format being supported on all cards. Some cards were only 15 or 16bit hicolor, others did truecolor, but only used 24bits, others had 32bits per pixel. Some displays had pixels in RGB order, while others used BGR order. It was a complete mess.

PTC served a real need by providing fast pixel format conversion from 32bit color to the display format on the fly so that programmers could work with a single pixel format. The original DOS PTC even emulated truecolor with “fakemodes” on VGA cards when no truecolor support was available.

Nowadays just about every graphics card supports 32bit ARGB8888 color, so the pixel format converters in PTC are not often used. 3D hardware has taken off, and software rendering is considered an archaic past-time by most. After all, why would you want to render in software in the days of vertex and pixel shaders and rapidly advancing hardware?

Ironically, it is these same advances in hardware that are fuelling 3D rendering have opened up a new frontier for software rendering. Floating point color.

Now at the end of 2004, we find ourselves in a world where the absolute latest 3D hardware supports some form of floating point color, but it it could be either 16, 24 or 32bits wide. The vast majority of graphics cards out there right now simply dont support floating point color at all.

Sound familiar? Exactly 10 years after PTC development started, I present you with a new graphics libarary called “Pixel Toaster”. This new library takes the best elements of PTC, OpenPTC and TinyPTC to create a C++ API that is both simple and powerful. It supports both floating point color and 32bit truecolor as a source format at your choice, provides basic keyboard and mouse input, and a high resolution timer.

The website and forums for Pixel Toaster are still being developed, but a preview version for Windows is available now from www.pixeltoaster.com