Indirect draw
A draw call whose vertex count, instance count and offsets are read from a GPU buffer instead of being passed by the CPU — letting the GPU decide for itself what to draw.
An ordinary draw call takes its parameters — how many vertices, how many instances, where in the buffer they sit — straight from the CPU. An indirect call instead points at a small buffer in GPU memory holding exactly those numbers. OpenGL gained glDrawArraysIndirect in 4.0 (2010) and the multi variant glMultiDrawIndirect in 4.3; Vulkan has vkCmdDrawIndirect and Direct3D its ExecuteIndirect.
The win is that the CPU no longer has to know how many objects ended up visible. An earlier GPU pass can cull occluded geometry, compact the list and write the count — all without a round trip to the processor. The multi-draw form goes further: a single buffer describes thousands of distinct draws in one call. It is the keystone of GPU-driven rendering.