Cubes - Individual faces

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I am using a VAO to render a voxel landscape. I am working on some rough optimizations currently and I just had a couple of questions about best practices.

  1. Is it enough to exclude index data or should I get rid of the vertex data too? (it seems faster to just keep the vertex data loaded)
  2. Should I disable drawing by excluding index data or should I use glCullFace(front and back)?
  3. If anybody could point me to some documentation on how to analyze OpenGL efficiencies/run-time, that would be awesome!

Cheers,

-QuicK

#2

Just a quick update:

I overhauled the rendering method for this project and it is not running a LOT better.

Before, I had trouble rendering even two 16x16x16 chunks of cubes and now I can render multiple 16x32x16 chunks with no issue.

The solution for me was to load all vertex, texture, and index data into one VAO per chunk and this seems to be working very well so far.

Cheers,

-QuicK