OpenGL Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3, Eighth Edition

Buffer Textures

Buffer textures are a special class of texture that allow a buffer object to be accessed from a shader as if it were a large, one-dimensional texture. Buffer textures have certain restrictions and differences from normal one-dimensional textures but otherwise appear similar to them in your code. You create them as normal texture objects, bind them to texture units, control their parameters¹⁶ with glTexParameteri(). However, the storage for the texture’s data is actually owned and controlled by a buffer object (hence the name buffer texture). Also, buffer textures have no internal sampler and sampler objects have no effect on buffer textures. The main differences between buffer textures and one-dimensional textures are as follows: ...