I was looking for ways to associate attributes with arbitrary groupings of verticies, at first instancing appeared to be the only way for me to accomplish this, but then I stumbled up this question and this answer states :
However what is possible with newer versions of OpenGL is setting the rate at which a certain vertex attribute's buffer offset advances. Effectively this means that the data for a given vertex array gets duplicated to n vertices before the buffer offset for a attribute advances. The function to set this divisor is glVertexBindingDivisor.
(emphasis mine)
Which to me seems as if the answer is claiming I can divide on the number of vertices instead of the number of instances. However, when I look at glVertexBindingDivisor's documentation and compare it to glVertexAttribDivisor's they both appear to refer to the division taking place over instances and not vertices. For example in glVertexBindingDivisor's documentation it states:
glVertexBindingDivisor and glVertexArrayBindingDivisor modify the rate at which generic vertex attributes advance when rendering multiple instances of primitives in a single draw command. If divisor is zero, the attributes using the buffer bound to bindingindex advance once per vertex. If divisor is non-zero, the attributes advance once per divisor instances of the set(s) of vertices being rendered. An attribute is referred to as instanced if the corresponding divisor value is non-zero.
(emphasis mine)
So what is the actual difference between these two functions?
So what is the actual difference between these two functions?
Modern OpenGL has two different APIs for specifying vertex attribute arrays and their properties. The traditional glVertexAttribArray and friends, where glVertexAttribDivisor is also part of.
With ARB_vertex_attrib_binding (in core since GL 4.3), a new API was introduced, which separates the vertex format from the pointers. It is expected that switching the data pointers is fast, while switching the vertex format can be more expensive. The new API allows to explictely control both aspects separately, while the old API always sets both at once.
For the new API, a new layer of introduction was introduced: the buffer binding points. (See the OpenGL wiki for more details.) glVertexBindingDivisor specifies the attribute instancing divisor for such a binding point, so it is the conceptual equivalent of the glVertexAttribDivisor function for the new API.