VBOs strangely slow?

[Baughn]

I have here two short programs doing the same thing, namely drawing random points on the screen.

The first one uses VBOs; the second, OpenGL 1.1 drawArrays. There are a couple parameters to play with; the number of VBOs to use in a round-robin fashion, etc. It doesn't really matter what parameters are used, as the results are approximately the same whatever you do.

That is, that the second, VBO-less program runs roughly ten times faster than the first in all cases, except if you comment out the VBO update entirely and only initialize them at startup, in which case they're the same speed.

Now, this is hardly the ideal use for VBOs - being used only once, and all - but it still seems odd to me that the difference would be that dramatic. Thus, my question: Am I doing something obviously and horribly wrong?

[DmitryM]

I recall several discussions already claiming VBOs are slow. It almost doesn't make sense because they are the only choice in pure GL3. So, unless you are not aiming at future or doing something wrong, you can expect them to work at least as fast as vertex arrays.

Anyway, did you try to play with vbo usage hint parameter?

[Baughn]

Yes, all _DRAW permutations have been tested; they make no apparent difference. (STATIC_DRAW was no slower, even.. you'd think it would be)

I also tested bufferSubData vs. bufferData in those permutations.

[Baughn]

Orr it could be because the lowermost program actually transfers far less data. Um. Yeah.

Though even with that fixed, VBOs are /still/ 40% slower.

[Alfonse Reinheart]

Why are you creating the buffer object with GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW in one case, and GL_STREAM_DRAW in another?

Also, what hardware are you running this on?

[Baughn]

I was testing various combinations to see what, if anything, had an effect. So far nothing's produced any change at all.

Fixing the non-VBO case so the entire array is actually used, I'm looking at ~6,000ms for non-VBO, ~10,000ms for VBO (absolutely regardless of that setting), and ~8,000ms to upload it as a texture which I then proceed not to use.

My preference would be to have a way to do this via DMA. Hand the drivers a pointer which I can tell them I won't be changing until some later point (at which point I presumably need a sync call of some sort), and let the DMA engine do the memory-copy. I don't suppose that's possible?

[Alfonse Reinheart]

So, what hardware are you running this on?

Also, why are you use the ARB extension function pointers, rather than the core function pointers? I don't imagine that this will have any effect, but it does seem highly unnecessary.

I don't suppose that's possible?

Have you tried mapping the buffers?

[Baughn]

In the end, glMapBuffer was (much) faster; preceding it with a glBufferData with a null pointer (discarding its contents), 10% faster than the vertex array.

All's well that ends well? I guess, but it's still not obvious to me why the other way of using them is in this case /slower/.

EDIT: Well, yes, MapBuffer should be able to use DMA transfers.. that makes perfect sense. That's still missing a way to do a DMA transfer from an array that needs to stay readable in main memory, but I suppose it doesn't matter; I don't need that ability right now.

And I was using the ARB versions because they have the exact same API, thus are supported everywhere the core versions are (that I've seen); the other way around is not quite the case, though I haven't personally seen that either.

[Ilian Dinev]

Try also the glBuffersubdata approach.
YMMV

[Baughn]

I tried it (I think?), just uncomment the glBufferSubData line in the paste.. no difference.