Game Programming using Qt 5 Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

GL buffers

Using attribute arrays can speed up programming, but for rendering all data still needs to be copied to the graphics card on each use. This can be avoided with OpenGL buffer objects. Qt provides a neat interface for such objects with its QOpenGLBuffer class. The currently supported buffer types are vertex buffers (where the buffer contains vertex information), index buffers (where the content of the buffer is a set of indexes to other buffers that can be used with glDrawElements()), and also less-commonly-used pixel pack buffers and pixel unpack buffers. The buffer is essentially a block of memory that can be uploaded to the graphics card and stored there for faster access. There are different usage patterns available that dictate ...