Is it possible to reuse glsl vertex shader output later?

Question

I have a huge mesh(100k triangles) that needs to be drawn a few times and blend together every frame. Is it possible to reuse the vertex shader output of the first pass of mesh, and skip the vertex stage on later passes? I am hoping to save some cost on the vertex pipeline and rasterization.

Targeted OpenGL 3.0, can use features like transform feedback.

Answer 1

I'll answer your basic question first, then answer your real question.

Yes, you can store the output of vertex transformation for later use. This is called Transform Feedback. It requires OpenGL 3.x-class hardware or better (aka: DX10-hardware).

The way it works is in two stages. First, you have to set your program up to have feedback-based varyings. You do this with glTransformFeedbackVaryings. This must be done before linking the program, in a similar way to things like glBindAttribLocation.

Once that's done, you need to bind buffers (given how you set up your transform feedback varyings) to GL_TRANSFORM_FEEDBACK_BUFFER with glBindBufferRange, thus setting up which buffers the data are written into. Then you start your feedback operation with glBeginTransformFeedback and proceed as normal. You can use a primitive query object to get the number of primitives written (so that you can draw it later with glDrawArrays), or if you have 4.x-class hardware (or AMD 3.x hardware, all of which supports ARB_transform_feedback2), you can render without querying the number of primitives. That would save time.

Now for your actual question: it's probably not going to help buy you any real performance.

You're drawing terrain. And terrain doesn't really get any transformation. Typically you have a matrix multiplication or two, possibly with normals (though if you're rendering for shadow maps, you don't even have that). That's it.

Odds are very good that if you shove 100,000 vertices down the GPU with such a simple shader, you've probably saturated the GPU's ability to render them all. You'll likely bottleneck on primitive assembly/setup, and that's not getting any faster.

So you're probably not going to get much out of this. Feedback is generally used for either generating triangle data for later use (effectively pseudo-compute shaders), or for preserving the results from complex transformations like matrix palette skinning with dual-quaternions and so forth. A simple matrix multiply-and-go will barely be a blip on the radar.

You can try it if you like. But odds are you won't have any problems. Generally, the best solution is to employ some form of deferred rendering, so that you only have to render an object once + X for every shadow it casts (where X is determined by the shadow mapping algorithm). And since shadow maps require different transforms, you wouldn't gain anything from feedback anyway.