Vertex Specification Best Practices

Overview

See VBO for general details.

Size of a VBO/IBO

• How small or how large should a VBO be?

You can make it as small as you like but it is better to put many objects into one VBO and attempt to reduce the number of calls you make to glBindBuffer and glVertexPointer and other GL functions.

You can also make it as large as you want but keep in mind that if it is too large, it might not be stored in VRAM or perhaps the driver won't allocate your VBO and give you a GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY.

1MB to 4MB is a nice size according to one nVidia document. The driver can do memory management more easily. It should be the same case for all other implementations as well like ATI/AMD, Intel, SiS.

Formatting VBO Data

VBOs are quite flexible in how you use them. For instance, there are a number of ways you can represent vertex attribute data in VBOs:

(VVVV) (NNNN) (CCCC)

One option for using them would be, for each batch (draw call) allocate a separate VBO per vertex attribute. This is certainly possible. If you have vertex, normal, and color as vertex attributes, pictorially this is: (VVVV) (NNNN) (CCCC)

(VVVVNNNNCCCC)

Another approach is to store the vertex attribute blocks in a batch, one right after the other, in the same block and stuff them all in the same VBO. When specifying the vertex attributes via gl*Pointer() calls you'd pass byte offsets into the VBO to the ptr parameters. Pictorially, this is: (VVVVNNNNCCCC).

(VNCVNCVNCVNC)

Yet another approach is to interleave the vertex attributes for each vertex in a batch, and then store each of these interleaved vertex blocks sequentially, again combining all the vertex attributes into a single buffer. As before, you'd pass byte offsets into the VBO to the gl*Pointer() ptr parameters, but you'd also use the stride parameter to ensure each vertex attribute array access only touched elements for that attribute array. Pictorially, this option is: (VNCVNCVNCVNC)

Now this is just a single batch. There's also nothing stopping you from storing the vertex attribute data for multiple batches inside a single VBO or set of VBOs.

Now what's best for performance? That's going to depend on the specific GL hardware and driver, but we can apply a little common sense to help steer our choices. First, combining multiple batches often rendered side-by-side into a single VBO or set of VBOs makes sense because this can result in fewer buffer binds inside the application (assuming the application implements lazy VBO buffer binds). Also, for static vertex attribute data, interleaving the vertex data in the VBO makes sense because this results in better memory locality and streaming inside the GPU. However, if we need to dynamically update a single vertex attribute in a batch every so often, we'll likely want to pull this vertex attribute off into its own VBO so we can update it by itself.

Note that when interleaving vertex attribute data some folks say there is gain to be had by aligning blocks of interleaved vertex data on 32-byte-aligned boundaries (keep in mind, there's nothing stopping you from inserting dead space into a VBO, if you're using the stride parameter to your pointer set calls). However, I personally have not seen any significant gain from doing this.

Vertex, normals, texcoords

• Should you create a separate VBO for each? Would you lose performance?

If your data is static, then make 1 VBO for best performance. Be sure to interleave your vertex attribute data in the VBO and make the data block for each vertex a multiple of 32 bytes for good cache line coherence. See the other VBO page because it explains these details.

If one of the vertex attributes is dynamic, such as the vertex positions, you could store this in separate VBO.

By dynamic, we mean that you will be updating the VBO every frame. Perhaps you want to compute the new vertices on the CPU. Perhaps you are doing some kind of water simulation. etc.

No, you don't lose much performance if you use separate VBOs. It would be on the order of 5% but your testing might show otherwise.

EXAMPLE: Multiple Vertex Attribute VBOs Per Batch

  //Binding the vertex
  glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vertexVBOID);
  glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(float)*3, NULL);  //Vertex start position address

  //Bind normal and texcoord
  glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, otherVBOID);
  glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(float)*6, NULL); //Normal start position address
  glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(float)*6, sizeof(float*3);  //Texcoord start position address

Dynamic VBO

Main article: Buffer Object Streaming

• If the contents of your VBO will be dynamic, should you call glBufferData or glBufferSubData (or glMapBuffer)?

If you will be updating a small section, use glBufferSubData. If you will update the entire VBO, use glBufferData (this information reportedly comes from a nVidia document). However, another approach reputed to work well when updating an entire buffer is to call glBufferData with a NULL pointer, and then glBufferSubData with the new contents. The NULL pointer to glBufferData lets the driver know you don't care about the previous contents so it's free to substitute a totally different buffer, and that helps the driver pipeline uploads more efficiently.

Another thing you can do is double buffered VBO. This means you make 2 VBOs. On frame N, you update VBO 2 and you render with VBO 1. On frame N+1, you update VBO 1 and you render from VBO 2. This also gives a nice boost in performance for nVidia and ATI/AMD.

Vertex Layout Specification

A lot of new code gets written this way

  glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vboID);
  glEnableClientState(GL_VERTEX_ARRAY);
  glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(TVertex_VNTWI), info->posOffset);
  glTexCoordPointer(2, GL_FLOAT, sizeof(TVertex_VNTWI), info->texOffset);
  glEnableClientState(GL_TEXTURE_COORD_ARRAY);
  glNormalPointer(GL_FLOAT, sizeof(TVertex_VNTWI), info->nmlOffset);
  glEnableClientState(GL_NORMAL_ARRAY);
  ///////////////
  int weightPosition = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "blendWeights");
  glVertexAttribPointer(weightPosition, 4, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, sizeof(TVertex_VNTWI), info->weightOffset);
  glEnableVertexAttribArray(weightPosition);
  ///////////////
  int indexPosition = glGetAttribLocation(programID, "blendIndices");
  glVertexAttribPointer(indexPosition, 4, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, GL_FALSE, sizeof(TVertex_VNTWI), info->indexOffset);
  glEnableVertexAttribArray(indexPosition);
  ///////////////
  glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER, iboID);
  glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, numIndices, GL_UNSIGNED_SHORT, 0);

and in the shader, would be using gl_Vertex, gl_Normal and gl_MultiTexCoord0. It is better to use generic vertex attributes for your vertex, normal and texcoord as well, since it is the modern way of specifying your vertex layout. You are already using it for your blendWeights and blendIndices.

In GL 3.1+ core contexts, you are forced to use your own vertex attributes with calls to glVertexAttribPointer.

See Also

• Post Transform Cache