Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe (REQUIRED):
By learning the OpenGL renderer of the Defold engine, I came to the conclusion that it is designed as if it was created according to the OpenGL handbook (I hope that didn't sound rude!). I mean that any draw call starts with activation (or bind) of an object/texture/program and ends with deactivation (or unbind). Even if the next draw call uses the same texture, the same program, the same matrices, etc.

As we know, OpenGL is stateful. Therefore, you can specify texture parameters once, set constants to the program once, and so on.

How to use this fact? In modern games 50-100 draw calls per frame is becoming normal, because it is impossible to draw shadows, outlines, other effects and objects themselves in 1-3 draw calls. And I have found that in my game for about 100 draw calls the Defold engine makes about 5000 API calls. In a single frame! That may not be so much, but modern OpenGL is:

• on desktop runs as a client-server, commands are passed asynchronously. So graphics API calls do not go directly to the graphics card and passing any commands most likely takes extra CPU time.
• on web each API call is a long chain of calls: Wasm -> JavaScript -> Browser -> [OpenGL] or [ANGLE -> DirectX] or [ANGLE -> Metal] (depends on the platform).

And I came to the point that we can reduce the number of OpenGL API calls if we:

• Do not set the same texture filtering parameters every draw call.
• Cache values of uniform constants and update them only when they are really changed. This is especially noticeable when rendering models, when you need to draw 50 models with the same material that has 20 constants with almost the same values.

Describe the solution you'd like (REQUIRED):
Reduce the number of OpenGL API calls by setting texture parameters and constants once, and so on.