Try not use VBOs then
The question is, why they push the use of a new feature if it's not implemented well?
Conclusion, even with traditional glBegin/End you can get an outstanding performance as long as you algorithmically optimize vs. instruction/pixel/hardware optimization.
Personally, I only believe in hardware rasterizer as an alternative fast way to software rasterization. Other than this, try use a pure shader path and see if it's slower or faster
Did you read the thread? He said, "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." In short, VBOs worked better for him, once he was using the correct API. So your "conclusion" is errant nonsense.Try not use VBOs then
The question is, why they push the use of a new feature if it's not implemented well?
Conclusion, even with traditional glBegin/End you can get an outstanding performance as long as you algorithmically optimize vs. instruction/pixel/hardware optimization.
On topic, you should use glMapBufferRange if that extension is available. Using the invalidation flag, you don't even need the glBufferData(NULL) part.
"Try not use VBOs then"
If it's confusing...because sometimes you change the order of commands and you get different/unexpected results on middle end hardware.
"The question is, why they push the use of a new feature if it's not implemented well?"
Because ppl talking about expected a huge perfomance gain when using VBOs.
"Conclusion, even with traditional glBegin/End you can get an outstanding performance as long as you algorithmically optimize vs. instruction/pixel/hardware optimization."
A better way to optimize software
....
Try shoving 10 million tris to the gpu per frame at 60fps without VBOs, while needing flexibility that display-lists do not give (and you'd like to not waste VRAM for the different permutations required otherwise with DLs).
Use GL_STATIC_DRAW and don't update your data pointer (via glBufferData or glBufferSubData)in your for loop. I would think these calls cause the geometry to be sent over to the graphics adapter every time.
That's pretty much the idea. I don't actually update the array here (because I just want to benchmark transfer speed, not random-number generation), but the target program writes new data every frame.
Well, mapping the buffer works very nicely.
That's interesting. When I've tried Map vs. Sub, Sub was faster (with invalidate of course, so multiple buffers are in-flight in the driver [allegedly], and fixing the VBO max size -- no resizing).Originally Posted by Baughn
But yeah, pure VBOs are odd. You'd think they'd always be faster, but some of the time they're slower (most of the time on pre-SM4 cards). Unless you play the "Ouija board" correctly per card per driver rev.
Heck, one of our devs even found it can be faster using CPU-side index list with VBO vertex attributes on some cards, when the index list changes frequently.
- Map vs. Sub.
- Invalidate vs. not.
- Sync vs. not.
- Static vs. stream vs. dynamic.
- Dynamic max VBO size or not.
- Interleaved attributes vs. separate.
- Multiple batches per VBO vs. not.
- Mixing index and vertex arrays in one buffer or not.
- Max VBO size X or Y.
- 32-byte-aligned verts or not.
- Ring of N buffers or one.
- Vtx fmts X or Y for colors, normals, texcoords, etc.
- Latency between upload and use X or Y.
- Call glVertexPointer first, last, or in between.
On pre-SM4 cards VBO perf used to be a total crapshoot, with it more likely to be slower than client arrays than faster, and that's without any dynamic VBO updates (you laugh, but we still have customers in the field with these and thus have to support them; these cards are only ~3yrs old and our customers use lots of GPUs). For recent gen cards, it's getting easier to be faster with VBOs, though still possible to find cases where VBOs lag. Batch setup seems more expensive with them than client arrays.
VBO updates aside though, I will say I am pleased with VBO performance on recent cards particularly using NVidia's bindless batch data extension. With that, I can get very near to the performance of their legendary display lists (it's ~2X slower without bindless). So no doubt NVidia display lists use bindless internally (of course). VBOs+bindless is definitely the future (unless they come up with something even faster)
That's a very good question. VBO's would have been a much easier sell if they didn't positively suck when they were first introduced, which lasted for several generations of cards. They're still a Ouigi board, but the Ouigi board has gotten much smaller on recent cards.The question is, why they push the use of a new feature if it's not implemented well?
Another reason VBOs weren't such a slam-dunk sell is the vendors did not provide guidance to say specifically "this is how you get the fastest VBO performance on our cards: use permutation A,B,C,F,M,P,R". And when there was a tip dropped, if you tried it, half the time it was worse performance.
Could you post your exact map code example in a follow-up? I think it'd be useful/informative for a number of folks to run all 3, and let you/us verify that everyone's seeing similar results on varying GPUs/vendors/drivers on exactly the same code.
Not sure if someone said it before but, what are your GL_MAX_ELEMENTS_VERTICES and GL_MAX_ELEMENTS_INDICES.
Extending those things will have bad results.
Just for kicks, and to come to some VBO upload performance conclusions on modern hardware (at least with this 8MB/upload example), I thought I'd take the original two permutations (same VBO sizes/contents/rendering), and try a few variations for comparison:
1. 2.163s - Client arrays
2. 2.801s - BufferData load/reload
3. 2.876s - BufferData NULL, BufferSubData load
4. 1.985s - BufferData NULL, MapBuffer load, UnmapBuffer
5. 2.013s - glMapBufferRange MAP_INVALIDATE load, UnmapBuffer
6. 2.078s - glMapBufferRange MAP_INVALIDATE load, UnmapBuffer with buffer load/use lag of 2
Test setup:
- NVidia GTX 285 GPU, Core i7 920 CPU, PCIe 2.0
- NVidia 190.32 Linux drivers
Option #3 used to be the fastest. But on modern hardware/drivers it's now the dead slowest, at least with this example.
Also, options #4 and #5 can be made ~60ms faster (3%) merely by using fewer buffers (e.g. 1 instead of 3).
It's interesting to note this nets an upload rate of ~2 GB/sec (6.4 GB/sec practical max PCIe2, 8.0 GB/sec theoretical max, 8.3 GB/sec theoretical max CPU mem).
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