OpenGL: Buffer object performance issue

Question

I have a question related to Buffer object performance. I have rendered a mesh using standard Vertex Arrays (not interleaved) and I wanted to change it to Buffer Object to get some performance boost. When I introduce buffers object I was in shock when I find out that using Buffers object lowers performance four times. I think that buffers should increase performance. Does it true? So, I think that I am doing something wrong...

I have render 3d tiled map and to reduce amount of needed memory I use only a single tile (vertices set) to render whole map. I change only texture coordinates and y value in vertex position for each tile of map. Buffers for position and texture coords are created with GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW parameter. The buffer for indices is created with GL_STATIC_DRAW because it doesn't change during map rendering. So, for each tile of map buffers are mapped and unmapped at least one time. Should I use only one buffer for texture coords and positions?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Try moving your vertex/texture coordinates with GL_MODELVIEW/GL_TEXTURE matrices, and leave buffer data alone (GL_STATIC_DRAW alone). e.g. if tile is of size 1x1, create rect (0, 0)-(1, 1) and set it's position in the world with glTranslate. Same with texture coordinates.

VBOs are not there to increase performance of drawing few quads. Their true power is seen when drawing meshes with thousands of polygons using shaders. If you don't need any forward compatibility with newer opengl versions, I see little use in using them to draw dynamically changing data.

Answer 2

If you need to update the buffer(s) each frame you should use GL_STREAM_DRAW (which hints that the buffer contents will likely be used only once) rather than GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW (which hints that they will be but used a couple of times before being updated). As far as my experience goes, buffers created with GL_STREAM_DRAW will be treated similarly to plain ol' arrays, so you should expect about the same performance as for arrays when using it.

Also make sure that you call glMapBuffer with the access parameter set to GL_WRITE_ONLY, assuming you don't need to read the contents of the buffer. Otherwise, if the buffer is in video memory, it will have to be transferred from video memory to main memory and then back again (well, that's up to the driver really...) for each map call. Transferring to much data over the bus is a very real bottleneck that's quite easy to bump into.