Stupid question (probably) but I just want to make sure I am not making a wrong assumption…
If I issue a glBufferData command to copy data to the GPU, is there any latency before I can use that data to draw with? I know there is, obviously… But do I need to worry about it, or will the command return once the copy is complete?
I am experiencing a weird effect with about 2 million vertices I am splitting across several buffers, and the only explanation I can come up with is that the data is not getting there by the time I try to draw it initially…
But out of curiosity can anyone point me to a good source of info about how the data is actually transferred. I would like to have a low level understanding so I can try to optimize some very large data transfers I am doing, and see if there is any way to multi-thread them.
afaik, nVidia’s VAR/fence extension + ATi’s full gpu documentation show nicely what dataformats for which elements are directly supported by hardware, so your drivers won’t need to transcode the data. Also primitive-types you draw matter - some make the driver transcode. And afaik drawing triangles in wireframe-mode, also transcodes (diminished performance hints this).
For MapBuffer to be fast, you should call BufferSubData with a NULL data pointer first, then MapBuffer. This will allow the driver to be smart and optimize stuff.