I've tried using pngs with gradients as textures in my OpenGL ES based iPhone game. The gradients are not drawn correctly. How can I fix this?
By "not drawn correctly" I mean the gradients are not smooth and seem to degrade to sections of a particular color rather a smooth transition.
The basic problem is having too few bits of RGB in your texture or (less likely) your frame buffer. The PNG file won't be used directly by the graphics hardware -- it must be converted into some internal format. I do not know the OpenGL ES API, but presumably you either hand it the .PNG file directly or you first do some kind of conversion step and hand the converted data to Open GL ES. In either case consult the relevant documentation to ensure that the internal format used is of sufficient depth. For example, a 256 color palettized image will be sufficient as would a 24 bit RGB or 32 bit RGBA format. I strongly suspect your PNG is converted to RGB15 or RGB16 which has only 5 or 6 bits per color component -- not nearly enough to display a smooth gradient.