OpenGL bool uniform?

Jan Rüegg picture Jan Rüegg · Nov 13, 2015 · Viewed 26.4k times · Source

I'm trying to send a boolean to an OpenGL glsl shader.

Currently I have this in the shader:

uniform bool foo;

And I use this to set it:

glUniform1i(glGetUniformLocation(shader, "foo"), true);

There doesn't seem to be a glUniform1b, so I'm setting it as an integer. This seems to work fine.

Is there any problem with this approach? Is it portable, or could it break on other graphics cards / drivers? I'm using OpenGL 4.3 at the moment.

Answer

Bartek Banachewicz picture Bartek Banachewicz · Nov 13, 2015

§ 4.1 Basic Types The OpenGL Shading Language supports the following basic data types, grouped as follows:

  • bool a conditional type, taking on values of true or false
  • bvec2 a two-component Boolean vector
  • bvec3 a three-component Boolean vector
  • bvec4 a four-component Boolean vector

...

§ 4.1.2 Booleans To make conditional execution of code easier to express, the type bool is supported. There is no expectation that hardware directly supports variables of this type. (...)

As for setting:

§ 2.2.1 (...) When state values are specified using a different parameter type than the actual type of that state, data conversions are performed as follows:

  • When the type of internal state is boolean, zero integer or floating-point values are converted to FALSE and non-zero values are converted to TRUE.