Think of using this "design" more so from a software standpoint than a game and I hope it makes more sense.

I've been currently dabbling in OpenTK/OpenGL. I've created a class that represents a 2d rectangle, it is called a button. So, when a user instantiates a button, they can define any top/left/width/height locations and also a color. These can be changed at any time, so for my very first initial test, I just used the normal glBegin ... glEnd methods to render each button. For now it works, however I am not satisfied.

So I started reading/testing stuff about VBO's. From what I understand we don't want to make a VBO per object, so the idea of making 1 VBO per button is not ideal. This is the easiest start of VBO's for me though. I already did this as a quick test and it seemed to help performance a little bit, although I am still very underwhelmed. I understand that the constant switching of the binding buffer "per object" is the biggest downfall of this implementation.

Now that leaves me with an understanding that we should minimize the number of VBO's in total so the amount of switching the binding buffers is minimal. The understanding of this is what escapes me...

Buttons are just a start and they are predefined with 4 vertices (an array[3] of vertex - another quick class that holds x, y, z floats). The plan is too keep adding more classes that users can use (labels, lists, etc). These can then drawn in any fashion, not being forced into only 4 vertices "per control"...

I was thinking that anything with 4 vertices would go in 1 VBO, anything with 5 vertices in another, and so on... This way we only make new VBO's when they are needed, otherwise if something can fit into an already made VBO, we can add it there.

So, if someone renders a test of 100 buttons and 1 triangle, I will need 2 VBO's (100 buttons in 1 VBO and 1 triangle in the other VBO). Then the calls to draw 101 total objects is only 2 (1 per VBO).

Does this sound reasonable with how VBO's work? Or is there something else I should know or be doing?

P.S. - "Buttons" are my first class to me made, and there will exist both 2d and 3d stuff...

But if you were making a UI that changes very infrequently

I'm just not sure yet. The plan is to make it fully dynamic. That just gives me options from the start if I ever need them - changing the vertices, colors, etc.

It sounds like how I imagined would work then. I just need a way to keep track of which button (or class/control) corresponds to which set of vertices in the VBO.

I know that this isn't the way to be testing this, but I put in an integer counter and stopwatch. Every frame adds 1 to the counter and when the stopwatch elapses >= 1000 milliseconds, I reset the counter.

I spawned 1000 quads, each rendered with it's own Begin/End. The counter averaged between 25-30. I'm assuming this is equal to 1000 draw calls.

I then spawned 1000 quads into 1 VBO. The VBO now consists of an array of 4000 Vertex (a class that just holds X, Y, Z floats). The counter averaged between 75-80. I'm assuming this is equal to just 1 draw call.

I guess the increase in performance is nice to have. I'm just now concerned on how to go about modifying the individual pieces of the massive VBO array.

Previously, with the single Begin/End for each object, I could move (translate), rotate, color, etc each object individually as I see fit.

Now with using a VBO, I have mapped each object (which now contains a Guid on creation) to it's corresponding index entries in the massive array. So, at least now I can control the positioning of the objects (translating) individually. This just updates the entries for that object in the VBO array.

I've got some thinking and trial and error'ing to do about how to go about controlling individual rotations/scalings. For colors I have done some reading about creating another array to hold the color values for each piece. That seems about the same as the individual positions though.

Hopefully I am still on the right track...

If you don't need to read the vbo on the cpu side and if you don't have to update many different parts of the vbo it would propably be faster to just push updates to the vbo using GL.BufferSubData. That way the driver doesn't have to retrieve the data back from the gpu. This is because mapping the buffer has the driver retrieve the specified part of vbo from vram into ram and then on unmap transfering the whole thing back to vram. With buffersubdata it never retrieves anything from gpu and only updates the part specified in the command.

But all of the methods suggested here are valid and the only way of knowing wich one has the most performance is to profile them with your actual use case. And when doing that you propably should look into highprecision timer and timing individual frames. Keep a list of say 600 frames and you can get the shortest the longest and the avarage. Measuring performance in how many milliseconds or if you want even in nanoseconds is important as that gives a much better idea of just how much your performance drops than frames per second. Also keeping a record of individual frames lets you see the longest frames and help you find stutters and such more easily.

All you have to worry about is if your frame time exceeds 16 milliseconds then you can no longer quarantee 60 fps and you might need to optimize. Or if you are targeting a differrent fps(for vr i think you need over 90 and for mobile 30 should be enough) you can calculate the millisecond limit by 1000/fps.