Official Bindless Graphics feedback thread

NVIDIA just released a new and faster way of rendering with OpenGL, called Bindless Graphics. Bindless Graphics are changes to OpenGL that can enable close to an order of magnitude improvement in the CPU-limitedness of graphics applications. Recent improvements in programmability have focused on additional flexibility in shaders (expanding formats to include more float and integer types, better branching support, etc.) and enabling new features (geometry programs, transform feedback, etc), and while some of these allow offloading parts of certain workloads to the GPU, they don't directly attack the issues that dominate CPU time.

Bindless Graphics is enabled through two OpenGL extensions. NV_shader_buffer_load and NV_vertex_buffer_unified_memory

You can read the Bindless graphics tutorial for more detail.

Let us know how it works for you!

Barthold
(with my NVIDIA hat on)

Just a comment: A lot of updates recently from NVIDIA, nice to see all the updates and browse developer page (like few years back).

Reading the spec right now, seems nice. Presentation is well made. Currently our application is more CPU + State changes bound than GPU raw power limited, but I aim (hopefully) to test these new extension next week and see If it make a difference.

Ido

How does this extension interact with Map/Unmap usage patterns? I use map/unmap so I can update the VBO data in another thread. Will it still work?

Is 8800 support planned? (All beta drivers I can find are for 9200+ only.)

Are these extensions GL 3 only? In the spec, there are examples using GLSL version 1.20, but the header states that the spec is written against OpenGL 3.0.

I was hoping that NV_shader_buffer_load would have been an extension which allows saving compiled shaders to disk and reloading them later!

I haven't tried it yet, but it's nice to see that binding blocks of uniforms will now be as fast as changing a pointer.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Brolingstanz

Is 8800 support planned? (All beta drivers I can find are for 9200+ only.)

---

From the NVIDIA release: "Bindless Graphics is available starting with NVIDIA Release 185 drivers for hardware G80 and up."

That's what happens when you don't eat your veggies. :o
Sorry bout that.

Blindless Graphics aka (like) one of the good bits from LP.

Nice one NV, good to see that some of LP has survived in some form.

Just a shame that AMD wont get in on the act (I say this as an AMD GPU user, so no bias against them); because of that it would be intresting to see how much use this would get in the 'real' world.

Very nice! Great job, NVidia!

That's really nice !
But one thing I wonder is, since we are now able to get direct GPU global memory addresses, how does this interact with OpenGL SLI mode ? Is automatic scaling with multiple GPU still working ?