I think vbuffers/ibuffers/textures are a red herring here - the browser equivalent there would be re-requesting CSS files or images every frame, which nobody ha

I think vbuffers/ibuffers/textures are a red herring here - the browser equivalent there would be re-requesting CSS files or images every frame, which nobody has ever suggested. And yes, reusing unmodified GPU command buffers is a very old technique. The interesting thing here seems to be the equivalent of selectively patching a command buffer without rebuilding the whole thing, and I wasn't aware of any game-engine precedent there. (Though I haven't really followed graphics closely for years.) > Anything dynamic is usually handled on the GPU-side That mostly only applies to cosmetic stuff, e.g. particle systems or bone-weighted skinning. For anything where the output has to feed back into CPU-based logic like collision physics or AI or even coarse frustum culling, it gets messier. I believe there are async readback APIs these days so that you don't have to stall the whole pipeline to get anything out, but it's still tricksy.