Do bindless textures overcome the limit of GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS?

Question

When I have an array of samplers, for example:

uniform sampler3D RHToBounceGridR[MULTI_BOUNCES_NUM];

where MULTI_BOUNCES_NUM is bigger than GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS value, I get INVALID_OPERATION when dispatching the shader.

If I use Uniform block with bindless textures (handles)

layout (std140, binding = 0) uniform SamplersBuffer
{
    sampler3D samplers[MULTI_BOUNCES_NUM];
};

Or just uniforms

layout(bindless_sampler) uniform sampler3D RHToBounceGridR[MULTI_BOUNCES_NUM];

Does it overcome this limitation?

Answer 1

The specification defines GL_MAX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS as:

The maximum number of texture image units available to [the fragment shader]

Texture image units are locations in the OpenGL context to which you bind textures for use by shaders.

Bindless texture, as the name suggests, does not involve binding textures to texture image units. As such, they do not count against this limit:

Sampler uniforms specified using handles do not count as using any texture image unit, even if a texture referred to by a handle is currently bound to one or more texture image units.