Why do I have additional glBindBuffer() calls?

Question

I have a OpenGL2/OpenGLES2 application and it among others renders a sphere using the following pseudocode:

1. Update vertices data on CPU
2. call glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, ...) to update them on GPU size
3. in a loop calls glDrawElements

Now I'm checking it under RenderDoc and see additional calls to glBindBuffer between glDrawElements:

1. glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0)
2. glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, my_vbo_id)
3. glDrawElements

Why I see those additional calls? Why GL driver (or GL library?) inserts them?

Answer 1

Actually, those call are inserted by RenderDoc. Here the response from RenderDoc creator:

GLES has a legacy feature which allows you to specify vertex attribute pointers in CPU memory without using a vertex buffer at all

(same with indices without an index buffer)

renderdoc emulates that by checking when the drawcall happens if any such pointers exist, and quickly stuffing the data into a buffer, binding that buffer, and then restoring the state after the draw. That way most of the code only has to deal with vertex buffer handling from this century and not worry about CPU pointers

most of the heavy lifting is skipped if you use a VAO because CPU pointers can't be used with a VAO, but if you're not using one then it has to do the slower path of checking each attribute. In your case you're not using a VAO so it goes down the slow path, but then each attribute is using a vertex buffer so it never > actually has to do any emulation

it still ends up doing a couple of redundant bind calls when it's "cleaning up" > even if there's nothing to clean up