Why do images for textures on the iPhone need to have power-of-two dimensions?

Question

I\'m trying to solve this flickering problem on the iphone (open gl es game). I have a few images that don\'t have pow-of-2 dimensions. I\'m going to replace them with images

Answer 1

Typically, graphics hardware works natively with textures in power-of-2 dimensions. I'm not sure of the implementation/construction details that cause this to be the case, but it's generally how it is everywhere.

EDIT: With a little research, it turns out my knowledge is a little out of date -- a lot of modern graphics cards can handle arbitrary texture sizes now. I would imagine that with the space limitations of a phone's graphics processor though, they'd probably need to omit anything that would require extra silicon like that.