OpenGL Insights

Asynchronous Buffer Transfers

Ladislav Hrabcak and Arnaud Masserann

28.1 Introduction

Most 3D applications send large quantities of data from the CPU to the GPU on a

regular basis. Possible reasons include

• streaming data from hard drive or network: geometry, clipmapping, level of

detail (LOD), etc.;

• updating skeletal and blend-shapes animations on the CPU;

• computing a physics simulation;

• generating procedural meshes;

• data for instancing;

• setting uniform parameters for shaders with uniform buffers.

Likewise, it is often useful to read generated data back from the GPU. Possible sce-

narios are

• video capture [Kemen 10];

• physics simulation;

•