Do Not Update Data Buffers Mid-Frame#

Avoid touching any buffer when a frame is mid-flight to reduce stalls and temporary buffer stores.

Modifying in-flight resources currently in use by the GPU such as vertex buffers and textures has a significant cost. Graphics processors tend to have at least one frame of latency to ensure that the hardware is always well-occupied with work. Therefore, altering a resource required by an outstanding render will usually result in one of the following actions being taken:

  1. Stall in the buffer modifying API call until the outstanding render completes.

  2. A new temporary buffer allocated for the new data, so the buffer modifying API call can complete without stalling the CPU thread.

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As textures are generally accessed during fragment shading much later in the graphics pipeline than vertex attributes, the cost of a graphics driver stalling a texture modification is higher than modifying a vertex buffer. The driver may choose to avoid a stall entirely by creating temporary buffer stores (ghosting) which is good for performance, but it may not be desirable for applications that are already running out of buffer storage space.

The stalling and ghosting behaviour of graphics processors varies between different GPUs and driver versions. For optimal performance, only modify vertex buffers and textures when absolutely necessary. If buffers must be modified, use application-side circular buffering so that the graphics processor can read from one buffer object while the application’s CPU thread writes to another. This prevents the stalling and ghosting behaviours.

If the application is using the Vulkan graphics API, then it is the responsibility of the application developer to synchronise with the graphics processor. The appropriate mechanisms such as fences and semaphores must be put in place, to ensure that the application does not access a resource while the graphics processor is using it. This gives much more control over how and when resources are accessed, but comes at the cost of a more complex application as the driver will not safeguard against accessing data currently in use by the graphics processor.