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CPU Tuning: Immediate Mode Drawing

Immediate mode drawing means that OpenGL commands are executed when they're called, rather than from a display list. This style of drawing provides flexibility and control over both storage management and drawing traversal. The trade-off for the extra control is that you have to write your own optimized subroutines for data traversal. Tuning therefore has two parts:

While you may not use each technique in this section, minimize the CPU work done at the per-vertex level and use a simple data structure for rendering traversal.

There is no recipe for writing a peak-performance immediate mode renderer for a specific application. To predict the CPU limitation of your traversal, design potential data structures and traversal loops and write small benchmarks that mimic the memory demands you expect. Experiment with optimizations and benchmark the effects. Experimenting on small examples can save time in the actual implementation.


Optimizing the Data Organization
Optimizing Database Rendering Code

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