NVIDIA Command-List Support In Newest Drivers To Lower GL Overhead

Written by Michael Larabel in NVIDIA on 20 March 2015 at 09:39 AM EDT. 21 Comments
NVIDIA
While NVIDIA is working towards Vulkan and SPIR-V support, they aren't done optimizing for OpenGL as OpenGL will still be in use for years to come and there's many titles still seeking better performance. With the newest NVIDIA drivers, there's now NV_command_list support for further lowering the OpenGL overhead within the NVIDIA binary blob.

Within the NVIDIA 347.88 Windows driver released this week, the GL_NV_command_list extension is now supported. There's an imminent NVIDIA Linux driver update coming and it too will support NV_command_list for Linux games.

The command-list extension is about providing low overhead batching and replay of rendering commands and state changes. The extension can be found documented here. As indicated by the extension name, it's a NVIDIA-founded extension that for now is not part of any Khronos OpenGL extension.

OpenGL NVIDIA Command-List has been talked about for a few months as part of their "zero driver overhead" push. You can find out more about the benefits and potential for this OpenGL extension via the presentation embedded below.

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