Fundamentally, you need to understand two things: Vertex Array Objects (VAOs) are conceptually nothing but thin state wrappers. Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs) store actual data. Another way of thinking about this is that VAOs describe the data stored in one or more VBOs. Think of VBOs (and buffer objects in general) as unstructured arrays of … Read more
VAOs act similarly to VBOs and textures with regard to how they are bound. Having a single VAO bound for the entire length of your program will yield no performance benefits because you might as well just be rendering without VAOs at all. In fact it may be slower depending on how the implementation intercepts … Read more
“Vertex Array Object” is brought to you by the OpenGL ARB Subcommittee for Silly Names. Think of it as a geometry object. (As an old time SGI Performer programmer, I call them geosets.) The instance variables/members of the object are your vertex pointer, normal pointer, color pointer, attrib N pointer, … When a VAO is … Read more