public Class NVHalfFloat

This extension introduces a new storage format and data type for half-precision (16-bit) floating-point quantities. The floating-point format is very similar to the IEEE single-precision floating-point standard, except that it has only 5 exponent bits and 10 mantissa bits. Half-precision floats are smaller than full precision floats and provide a larger dynamic range than similarly-sized normalized scalar data types.

This extension allows applications to use half-precision floating point data when specifying vertices or pixel data. It adds new commands to specify vertex attributes using the new data type, and extends the existing vertex array and image specification commands to accept the new data type.

This storage format is also used to represent 16-bit components in the floating-point frame buffers, as defined in the NV_float_buffer extension.