SSBO vs VBO about newtonian-particle-simulator HOT 2 CLOSED

Hey. Good question.

This project did indeed rely on a Compute Shader in the past. I removed it in commit 2d99a79.
Before that particles were updated inside the CS and then read from a VS through a SSBO.
I also tried what I think you mentioned - streaming the SSBO as Vertex Attributes into the VS. That resulted in exactly the same performance.

However as you noticed I am now calculating and rendering in the same pass. I cant remember exact numbers, but I dont think splitting it into compute + render pass was any faster. Its also cleaner from a code style perspective and has less driver overhead.

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Makes sense, I can’t find any numbers showing that using ssbos would be slower than using vbos and attributes, and your solution is indeed very clean!

The only reason I could see where it would be slow is if ssbos by spec are synchronized between gpu/cpu memory each frame. If the buffer just stays in gpu-memory only, this should be as efficient as it gets, as you only have to set a few uniforms. :)

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