   Directly accessing mip leves of a texture
  I was wondering if it's possible to directly access mip levels of a texture in OpenGL! This looks pretty straightforward at first glance, but I have yet to find an appropriate solution proportionate to the simplicity of the problem itself. Here's a list of methods that are currently known to me, all of which needs a copy of some form. I'm looking for a function that somehow allows me to lock a mip level of a texture.1) glGetTexImage(), which downloads the requested mip level into system memory. The worst approach one can choose.2) Using an FBO to render to the texture as described by zimerman in this thread. Overkill.3) Using a PBO to allocate a buffer in local video memory and initiating a DMA assisted copy operation afterwards to copy the contents of the desired mip level into the buffer. Best approach so far, but still requires a copy.Am I missing something this obvious or is the functionality surprisingly not available?!Thanks.   
  If you do not want a copy of the texture level but just render with it, I guess you could use GL_TEXTURE_BASE_LEVEL in glTexParameteri to set it to the mipmap level you want to draw with. I think you'll need to have mipmapping on to make it work. So you'd better set the max level to the same number too.Otherwise, you'd probably need a copy anyway.   ;  Yes, you're right. It just dawned on me that I need a copy anyway. What else am I going to do with a pointer returned from lock() if I'm neither about to write to nor read from it? And both of these operations involve a copy. I think I was so focused on designing the abstraction layer itself (to bring D3D and OGL under the same hood) that I somehow lost the bigger picture.Thanks.   