OpenGL: SSBO vs "Buffer Texture" vs "PBO / Texture" to feed compute shader

Question

I need to feed float data to a compute shader.

The 3 ways I see of doing that are:

• Shader Storage Buffer Objects
• Buffer Texture
• 'classic' Texture (upload data to GPU using a PBO, then copy data to texture using glTexSubImage2D) and accessed as 'image2D' in the shader

What are the pros / cons / performance of each technique ?

I don't need filtering, I just need to access the raw float data. Since SSBO and Buffer Texture are 1D, that means if my data is '2D', I need to compute the offsets myself.

Answer 1

• Buffer Texture - useless
• Texture - if your data is matrix-type and can fit 4 channel-float it could be little faster than pure buffer, you can utilize functions like textureGather and texture filtering
• Image - like texture, but no samplers
• SSBO - universal solution, same performance as image, you can still put 2D array in buffer and index as data[y][x]