glDrawElementsInstanced vs glDrawElements

[Manel_Goucha]

Hi,

Working on a rendering concept, I was wondering if it makes sense to only use glDrawElementsInstanced for all the types of rendering (multiple isntances or just one)

what I mean is, normaly the glDrawElementsInstanced is used to render a set of elements that share the same mesh, and glDrawElements to render isolated elements that either differ in mesh and/or in material.

My ideia is, if I only use glDrawElementsInstanced to render everything, even when rendering only 1 element by passing count = 1, so:

doing glDrawElementsInstanced with count = 1 is it the same as glDrawElementsInstanced, or will it have a poor performance as when doing the latter? And if not, is it a bad practice?

Regards,
Jakes

[GClements]

glDrawElements is equivalent to glDrawElementsInstanced with the instancecount parameter equal to 1. It’s highly unlikely that there would be any performance difference.

[mhagain]

Worth noting that in Vulkan every draw call is an instanced draw call; there is no equivalent to glDrawElements. So that at least should indicate that at a layer closer to the hardware they are indeed equivalent.