Do they really *have* to be 1 Pixel high ? Doom3 has a few Textures that are basically just Ramps, for Light Falloffs etc, they are like 8 Pixels high. The Width is some Power of two as well. I guess you could feed any texture to the Graphics-Card as a "1D Texture" ( with some tex1D command in the fragment shader for…
1d textures can be used to store more complex calculations. Although this is less true today with powerful hardware. But think about any mathematical function that takes a single scalar value as input. Of course the result (unless float textures used) wouldnt be as precise, but especially in older card generations it was…
A 1d texture most definately is a line...the dividing one between technically adept minds and artistic ones it seems. For my own part, one of the greatest leaps i made was when i understood the power of storing values/computational results in an incredibly fast, massively parralell system. everything from radiance…