The first time anything is drawn it is converted from pixmap to an image regardless whether loadimage/loadpixmap was used.
Somebody asked for a flag to automatically create the texture but it never happened and I can't find the post (it was about 1 year ago).
I'm guessing if all images were loaded into video RAM immediately we'd run out of space on some machines pretty quickly.
I know that Bmax for DX uses auto-managed memory for textures which, I think, is why imagebuffers were not included.
Somebody asked for a flag to automatically create the texture but it never happened and I can't find the post (it was about 1 year ago).
I'm guessing if all images were loaded into video RAM immediately we'd run out of space on some machines pretty quickly.
I know that Bmax for DX uses auto-managed memory for textures which, I think, is why imagebuffers were not included.