misc

(these will often apply to OpenGL as well)

Avoid invalidating FBOs’ state

Almost any change to an FBO’s state will invalidate its framebuffer completeness. Set up your hot framebuffers ahead of time.

Delete objects eagerly

Don’t wait for the GC/CC to realize objects are orphaned and destroy them. Implementations track the liveness of objects, so ‘deleting’ them at the API level only releases the handle that refers to the actual object. (conceptually releasing the handle’s ref-pointer to the object) Only once the object is unused in the implementation is it actually freed. For example, if you never want to access your shaders directly again, just delete their handles after attaching them to a program.

Flush when expecting results (like queries or rendering frame completion)

Flush tells the implementation to push all pending commands out for execution, not leaving any around in a buffer, waiting for more commands to execute.

For example, it is possible for the following to never complete without context loss:

sync = glFenceSync(GL_SYNC_GPU_COMMANDS_COMPLETE, 0);
glClientWaitSync(sync, 0, GL_TIMEOUT_IGNORED);

WebGL doesn’t have a SwapBuffers call by default, so a flush can help fill the gap, as well.

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