iPhone OpenGl render text

Question

Does anyone know how can i render a string on the iphone? Its for displaying my frame per second with =p

Answer 1

There's no built-in way of rendering text in OpenGL but two more or less common techniques: Rendering the glyphs using geometry (less common) or using texture mapping (far more common). For your case texture mapping would be very easy: Set up a CGBitmapContext and render the text using Quartz. Then upload the image in the previously generated texture using glTexSubImage2D.

On the iPhone you could also just put a UILabel on top of you OpenGL view and let UIKit do the rendering. In my application this did not hit performance at all (even though Apple claims it does).

Answer 2

You can use a Texture2D and the initWithString method to draw text in OpenGL. See the crash landing example that is included in the iphone sdk.

You could also use a UILabel and have it on top of the opengl layer.