texturebuffere

texturebuffere is not a standard term in graphics literature and may be a misspelling of texture buffer or a proprietary name used in a specific engine. In general, a texture buffer refers to a memory region that stores texel data for sampling by a shader, typically used when a one-dimensional array of values is required rather than a traditional two-dimensional image.

In practice, a texture buffer is implemented by binding a buffer object to a texture target, creating a texture that can be read through texture sampling operations. In OpenGL this is achieved with a texture buffer object (TBO) bound via a function such as glTexBuffer, allowing the shader to access texels using indices. The data format is defined by a texel format, for example RGBA8 or R32F. Conceptually, a texture buffer provides random access to a sequence of texel values, indexed by a scalar coordinate rather than two-dimensional texture coordinates.

Common use cases include large data lookups, color palettes, or auxiliary per-pixel data that does not map to a regular image. Texture buffers support dynamic updates by modifying the underlying buffer, enabling streaming data into shaders without rebuilding a full texture.

Limitations include limited filtering and mipmapping options depending on hardware, and not all graphics pipelines or APIs expose texture buffers in the same way. They are most common in OpenGL-oriented workflows, with analogous concepts in other APIs such as Direct3D where a buffer can be viewed as a one-dimensional texture.

See also: texture buffer object, buffer texture, shader resource view.