Dependent texture reads on common GLES2 hardware

Question

Is there any OpenGL ES 2.0 level hardware where dependent texture reads/dynamic texture lookup will not incur overhead?

Apple recommends avoiding dynamic texture lookups since it increases the latency of accessing memory when sampling from the texture.

Is this a problem specific to the GPU hardware Apple uses in their devices or is this just a general problem with all OpenGL ES 2.0 level hardware? i.e, how does the Adreno GPU family handle dependent texture reads?

On a related note, I've seen in other places that dependent texture reads should not be a problem on GLES3 hardware, which I suppose is becoming the new "common". (I haven't found an official source for this but have seen it mentioned in various places.) — user8709

MoDJ MoDJ · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-18T05:06:05

The A7 and newer 64bit chips do not have dynamic texture lookup overhead, but these are ogles 3.0 devices. The older chips do have the additional overhead.

Dependent texture reads on common GLES2 hardware

1 Answers