Alright, now that works, I'd like to ask about textures vs. glDrawPixels.
What I do right now is get a 16-bit greyscale image from a framegrabber, run it through a contrast adjuster, then display that on the screen.
The contrast adjust works by taking in a minimum value to display and a maximum value. Anything below the minimum gets set to 0, anything above the maximum gets set to 255, and the rest gets spread linearly between 0 and 255. This is actually a look-up table that just gets recalculated when the user changes the input sliders.
It is my understanding that a texture works directly through the video card, whereas glDrawPixels uses the CPU. If I need to push the data through the LUT anyway, would it really help at all to use a texture instead of glDrawPixels?
Especially since the video card on the target compute for this program has 512MB of RAM, but our image stacks can easily get to 1GB at a time.
Basically, my layout for this is: get an image, stick it in the image stack as a 16-bit unsigned integer array. To display an image, I pull it out of the image stack, push it through the LUT, and display the result. So the way I see it, most of it stays in system memory. I know I don't know much about graphics, though, so I could be totally wrong. I just want to make sure what I do is likely to yield some good results before I invest all the time into doing it.