Original Post
I'm playing around with OpenGL 3.2, and it seems to me that binding textures really fragments what could otherwise be a pretty strait-forward batch drawing of primitives. IE: When drawing a bunch of 2d sprites, a vbo containing all of the data needed to draw them is trivial; however binding textures fragments the drawing calls. The best I can think of is to sort by image and draw each range from the vbo, but if drawing order is important, and not related to texture... this may not help much at all. It just seems to me that I should be able to pass an attribute to specify which texture to use... the texture is already in the gpu... so what's the problem? I could use texture arrays and all of my texture slots for a somewhat usable hack to get what I want, but it has it's limits. It seems nvidia's bindless extension is meant for buffers only, not textures... unless I'm missing something. Now... there are texture buffers, which may? be able to be bindless. They come out as a 1d texel array with no filtering or anything, so not ideal either. Does anyone know of something that would allow me to do this? Is there something I'm missing, or do I gotta just live with it?