One embodiment of the present invention sets forth a technique for reducing overhead associated with transmitting primitive draw commands from memory to a graphics processing unit (GPU). Command pairs comprising an end draw command and a begin draw command associated with a conventional graphics application programming interface (API) are selectively replaced with a new construct. The new construct is a reset topology index, which implements a combined function of the end draw command and begin draw command. The new construct improves efficiency by reducing total data transmitted from memory to the GPU.