What are Vertex Array Objects?

“Vertex Array Object” is brought to you by the OpenGL ARB Subcommittee for Silly Names. Think of it as a geometry object. (As an old time SGI Performer programmer, I call them geosets.) The instance variables/members of the object are your vertex pointer, normal pointer, color pointer, attrib N pointer, … When a VAO is … Read more

OpenGL VAO best practices

VAOs act similarly to VBOs and textures with regard to how they are bound. Having a single VAO bound for the entire length of your program will yield no performance benefits because you might as well just be rendering without VAOs at all. In fact it may be slower depending on how the implementation intercepts … Read more

What are the Attribute locations for fixed function pipeline in OpenGL 4.0++ core profile?

Outside of NVIDIA drivers, this does not work (reliably). Compliant drivers will only alias glVertexPointer (…) to attribute slot 0. NV in their infinite wisdom devised a standard non-standard scheme many years ago where they aliased all of the fixed-function pointers to certain attribute locations, but I do not know if new NV drivers support … Read more