Is SDL Render to Texture advisable?

SDL Development
1

Dear Everyone,

As a new SDL user, in particular, an SDL3 user, I was wondering if someone could possible give me some advice.

I am writing a program to render fractals using SDL3.

Currently I’m using SDL3 functions for writing pixels and I am not using OpenGL shaders etc.

The problem I have is that as I write each horizonal line of pixels as I go through the fractal generation process, when I perform a page flip, the back buffer gets erased and consequently, as the fractal is rendered, I miss every second horizontal line.

Am I right in presuming the workaround for this is to render to a texture, and then perform the ‘RenderPresent’ function?

If I am right, if someone could please advise as to the best way to do this, I’d be most grateful.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Kind regards,

Ashley Farnham

2

Not sure why you render before you have drawn the whole fractal but if you want what you have drawn to persist after calling SDL_RenderPresent then rendering to a texture is indeed the way to accomplish that. The only other alternative I can think of is to rerender everything that you had rendered previously plus the new stuff.

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3

Exactly, but it’s not a workaround, it’s simply the correct solution.

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