Bindless texturing

Vulkan
3

One of the challenges with supporting a more pure-GL-like bindless texturing approach, even in OpenGL, is missing SPIR-V IR support. Related:

See the last post for a 2022 update, including SPV_NV_bindless_texture . The last time we looked into this though, the tooling to make use of this was lacking. So AFAIK bindless texture via SPIR-V isn’t an option for either OpenGL or Vulkan.

And on Vulkan specifically, if you’re interested in some context on why the pure-Vulkan approach is what it is, think “lowest common denominator”. For details, see:

  • Vulkan “But WHY?” FAQ (Yosoygames, 2023)
    ** ← Specifically the last section: “Why resource binding is done through VkPipelineLayout & VkDescriptorSetLayout and all that madness”
  • Descriptors are hard (Ekstrand, 2022)

So, you may be able to choose a different tech approach depending on what your target set of GPUs is.