Implementing programmable vertex pulling (PVP) in OpenGL
The concept of programmable vertex pulling (PVP) was proposed in 2012 by Daniel Rákos in the amazing book OpenGL Insights. This article goes deep into the architecture of the GPUs of that time and why it was beneficial to use this data storage approach. Initially, the idea of vertex pulling was to store vertex data inside one-dimensional buffer textures and, instead of setting up standard OpenGL vertex attributes, read the data using texelFetch() and a GLSL samplerBuffer in the vertex shader. The built-in GLSL gl_VertexID variable was used as an index to calculate texture coordinates for texel fetching. The reason this trick was implemented was because developers were hitting CPU limits with many draw calls. Due to this, it was beneficial to combine multiple meshes inside a single buffer and render them in a single draw call, without rebinding any vertex arrays or buffer objects to improve draw calls batching.
This technique...