Hello,
It is a common practice for applications to sort by shader (and other states) before rendering. In order to implement this, I keep a cache of shader programs so I never call glCreateProgram for one that already exists.
My question is do drivers cache shader programs and objects under the hood? I imagine they do, at the least to avoid redundant compile and link steps. If so, is there still a cost associated with “switching shader programs” that are actually the same program under the hood (but different external IDs)?
I suppose this is more of a “just curious” question since I imagine it is a best practice for an application to do caching to minimize the number of GL objects created.
Regards,
Patrick