Re:Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library
by mortehu on Saturday March 26, 2022 @03:41PM
(#30814726)
It does imply to some degree that the entire geometry of the UI isn't stored in GPU memory. It's possible to store an entire UI, with text and all, in GPU memory and render it with a single call (e.g. glDrawElements).
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library
by flohofwoe on Saturday March 26, 2022 @03:48PM
(#30814776)
...and those GPU buffers need to be rebuilt as soon as anything in the UI changes. An immediate mode UI could just as well track state changes and only rebuild GPU buffers if needed.
Most just don't this (and instead use dynamic buffers which are updated with new data each frame) because the state diffing would complicate the implementation and is usually "not worth it", but they still implement batching within a single frame and reduce the amount of draw calls as much as possible (for instance in Dear ImGui, there's usually one draw call per scroll/clip region so you get away with a handful or at most a few dozen draw calls even for complex UIs).