Hello everyone,

Lately, I've been running into several design issues with my 'RenderManager'. Therefore I would like to ask how you tackle certain things.

First let me explain something about my RenderManager:
- Mostly shader driven (Vertex and pixel shaders only)
- Objects stored in VBO's on the GPU
- Every object can only have a single texture.

First Question:
What information do you pass to your RenderManager? Just the VBO-ID, RenderPrimitive, texture, position and rotation of every object or do you send a lot of descripting data along? If so, what data would that be?

Second question:
If you have some asset data, say a mesh. Do you load the file into memory, transfer it to the GPU (VBO) and free the memory or do you have a different approach?

I thank you all in advance,
assainator

I found the best source of information for this kind of thing were this, this, and this. Take note of the posts by Hodgman they are really informative.

Second question: If the vertex/index buffer or texture is created as set-only, you have no reason to keep them in memory unless it is DirectX 9 and you stored them in the default pool (which you generally don’t do).
Free them after submitting the graphics API.


L. Spiro

I've incrementally transitioned to an high level renderer (which I suppose it's your [font="Courier New"]RenderManager [/font]without the 'smart' management).

(1) What information do you pass to your RenderManager?
(2) If you have some asset data, say a mesh. Do you load the file into memory, transfer it to the GPU (VBO) and free the memory or do you have a different approach?

- When it comes to me (I'm not saying this is best or suggesting you to do the same) -

(1) Material to use, material-instance information blob and input-assembly setup (but that's likely going away in some future iteration).
The material-instance blob is currently a list of [font="Courier New"]ParameterFetcher [/font]objects fetching the data (can pull out data from scripts, set uniforms and textures). Building those fetcher objects is pretty involved and managing them has proven more difficult than predicted.
When it comes to you, I'd like to stress the fact that I allow "opaque" per-material settings with basically no limitation in line of concept. Your notion of "having a single texture" seems short-sighted at best. Plan to iterate soon.

(2) Graphics data is fetched to GPU and typically disposed immediately. In some cases, this is kept in memory, if per-triangle accurate collisions are requested. Keep in mind a mesh is typically much more than just graphics data, an approximated collision mesh will often be provided as well and must be retained, instanced and transformed correctly.

Thanks to all of you. You've provided me with something to think about the comming week.