1.1 More than just hardware buffers
Besides allowing buffers to be held on the GPU / AGP memory, we also took the opportunity to completely overhaul the way we represent geometry formats in the engine. Previously, the GeometryData and RenderOperation classes held explicit pointers to elements of the vertex, e.g. a pointer to the positions, a pointer to the normals etc. The type and format of the vertex elements was fixed (positions always had to be 3 floats for example), because that's how cards used too work. The latest generation of cards allow a lot more flexibility around what data you feed into them - for example if you like you can omit positions and generate them in the vertex shader, or use a 4D normal vector, among many other things.
In addition, since hardware buffers can be very large, there is more incentive to try to reuse and share buffers between meshes, perhaps using subsets of the same buffer for different purposes, perhaps even changing vertex format half way through the buffer - this sharing can be beneficial to performance because changing the source of the 'streams' of vertex data coming into the card can be comparatively expensive.
Finally, we also wanted to make it easier to switch the vertex sources used by a given piece of geometry, without changing the information held about the format of the vertex. Therefore we have the concept of buffer bindings - vertex elements (a position for example) are bound to a 'source index' which is not a pointer to a buffer, it's just an identifier. You then 'bind' this index to a real vertex buffer, and you can rebind it to another buffer if you wish later.
This document was generated
by Steve Streeting on , 12 2006
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