Bindless textures
A GPU model where shaders look up textures through handles in memory, instead of every draw binding them to fixed slots.
Traditionally a draw call must bind each texture to a fixed slot before it runs, which caps how many textures one shader can see and forces a state change — often a separate draw call — per material. Bindless replaces slots with handles: the shader indexes an array of resource descriptors, so a single draw can touch thousands of different textures.
It's the enabler for GPU-driven rendering, where the GPU builds its own draw lists. Exposed through ARB_bindless_texture (2013), Vulkan descriptor indexing and D3D12. The price is giving up the driver's slot-level validation.