Following up on the previous post on GPU utilization and performance, and to provide a practical example, I expanded a bit on a topic discussed in brief: vertex shader exports and their impact on performance. To measure the performance cost, I set up a small experiment, rendering 250 instances of a model 10 times, each…

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A detailed performance analysis examining how vertex shader exports impact GPU rendering performance. Through controlled experiments on RTX 3080, the study shows that increasing vertex shader exports from 1 to 10 float4 attributes nearly triples drawcall costs due to bottlenecks in GPU memory allocations (ISBE, TRAM) and the Primitive Engine. The research reveals that unused vertex exports are optimized away by NVIDIA GPUs, float exports scale better than float4, and different GPU architectures handle vertex data differently.

The performance impact of vertex shader exports