Feature Request: Load image directly into SDL GPU texture

[jsoulier]

Hey there,

Since SDL_ttf has support for the GPU API, does it make sense to add some convenience functions here for loading an image into a GPU texture?

To start, something like...

extern SDL_DECLSPEC SDL_GPUTexture * SDLCALL IMG_LoadGPUTexture(SDL_GPUDevice *device, SDL_GPUCopyPass *copy_pass, const char *path);

Basically just the same API as:

extern SDL_DECLSPEC SDL_Texture * SDLCALL IMG_LoadTexture(SDL_Renderer *renderer, const char *file);

Thanks

Edit: We probably need to specify the texture format as well

[alterae]

this would be great

relatedly, currently getting an image into a gpu texture requires manually calling SDL_ConvertSurface and requires that you manually choose a pixel format and gpu texture format that are compatible with one another (ie SDL_PIXELFORMAT_RGBA32 and SDL_GPU_TEXTUREFORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM)

this works but it feels more than a little awkward

[slouken]

@thatcosmonaut was looking into adding something like this for core SDL but decided against it. Do you remember why?

[thatcosmonaut]

I decided that it was better for SDL GPU to be format-agnostic - it's not really reasonable for SDL to bundle in arbitrary file format decoders.

[thatcosmonaut]

In general the design of SDL GPU skews way more towards being a platform layer than a convenience library. From that perspective it's much better to just provide the building blocks and let applications themselves make decisions about tradeoffs.

[slouken]

Okay, that makes sense for the core SDL library. SDL_image is a convenience library, so maybe it makes sense to have it here?

[slouken]

@jsoulier, would you like to create a PR for this?
It would work similar to IMG_LoadTexture() where it loads a surface and then converts the surface into a texture. I'm not sure how you'd manage the lifetime of the pixels with an async texture load in this case?

[jsoulier]

I can, though I'm not sure what you mean regarding an async texture load. Why has async come up?

[slouken]

I can, though I'm not sure what you mean regarding an async texture load. Why has async come up?

Never mind, go for it. :)

[jsoulier]

#675