Is using vec4 vertex buffer slow?

On the other hand, I also think using vec4 vertex buffers really waste the video memory, since I'm actually not using homogeneous coordinates on cpu-side, the extra component of vec4 is just placeholder to let SIMD work. vec3 or vec4, which would you prefer and why?

Thanks a lot!

Each GPU register is 4 floats wide anyway, so GPU-side it doesn't matter how many you send, you're going to be taking up a single 4-float register (disclaimer: your shader compiler may decide to pack 2 vec2s into a single register).

For bandwidth consumption, why don't you try it and see? CPU to GPU data transmission is a complex topic, and what may seem intuitive if you were talking about a pure CPU-only setup can quite often trip you up. So "it has more data, so it uses more memory, so it must be slower" can often turn out to be a completely invalid premise. If your vertex size is still falling within a multiple of 16 or 32 there's a very high chance that you won't even notice any difference at all. It may even run faster if it can bring your vertex size to exactly a multiple of 16 or 32.

You've got a clear tradeoff happening here. You're accepting some extra memory overhead in exchange for (hopefully!) faster operations CPU-side, which in-turn (and also hopefully) give a measurable overall performance gain, so I don't think it's valid to use words like "waste" when describing it. The extra memory is clearly being used - you may not be doing anything directly with it, but you're definitely using it to be able to get those faster operations.

I use 3xfloat position streams on desktop OpenGL, and 3xunsigned byte position streams on GLES2.

I have profiled that using 3xunsigned byte position streams on desktop OpenGL was slower on my Intel HD 3000 laptop than using 3xfloat. On Android Tegra2/3, it's been the other way around - 3xbyte was faster than 3xfloat.

Using 4xfloat may be a bit faster than 3xfloat on desktop, if there's some alignment benefit to the GPU, but I haven't profiled this. Perhaps that's something to try in practice?

To [color="#284b72"]mhagain:

Thanks for your analysis! I didn't know "Each GPU register is 4 floats wide". If it is so, then the situation on GPU side should be similar to CPU side. I mean, vec4 buffer should be, at least, no slower than vec3.

Your theory about "The extra memory is clearly being used" sounds quite reasonable. Thank you again.

To clb:

Thanks for your reply. If you get 4xfloat profiled one day, don't forget to share your result

Thanks for your analysis! I didn't know "Each GPU register is 4 floats wide".

And you shouldn't assume it is. Nvidia hardware for example doesn't work that way afaik while AMD does... But i guess even there that will vary between architecture. Another thing to consider is how big your vertex format ends up being. Your probably want it to be a multiple of 16byte or 32byte...