I am currently implementing UBOs and Buffer Textures in an effort to go from using glUniforms which are quite decent performance to something more per-frame and per-world-transition.

I have a few thousands of mesh chunks that are generated for coordinate (0, 0) so that I can translate them wherever I need. I'm now doing the translation with a glUniform call each time I make a draw call. I would like to transition away from this by using UBOs (once per frame to setup all per-frame stuff) and then using texture buffers to translate and get better control over chunks.

1. Is this new method much faster than before? If the answer is no, it might not be worth it for me

2. How do I make sure that a given mesh that knows nothing about itself can sample from the right index in the texture buffer? There might be a ray of hope here if each draw call could be numbered from 0 .... N-1.

EDIT: I baked in a mesh ID in all meshes and used a vec3 buffer texture as translation to avoid setting any kind of uniform data at all. I didn't notice any performance improvements.