New Resource Types

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Several new resource types have been added in Direct3D 11.

Read/Write Buffers and Textures

Shader model 4 resources are read only. Shader model 5 implements a new corresponding set of read/write resources:

These resources require a resource variable to access memory (through indexing) as there are no methods for accessing memory directly. A resource variable can be used on the left and right sides of an equation; if used on the right side, the template type must be single component (float, int, or uint).

Structured Buffer

A structured buffer is a buffer that contains elements of equal sizes. Use a structure with one or more member types to define an element. Here is a structure with three members.

struct MyStruct
{
    float4 Color;
    float4 Normal;
    bool isAwesome;
};

Use this structure to declare a structured buffer like this:

StructuredBuffer<MyStruct> mySB;

In addition to indexing, a structured buffer supports accessing a single member like this:

float4 myColor = mySb[27].Color;

Use the following object types to access a structured buffer:

Atomic functions which implement interlocked operations are allowed on int and uint elements in an RWStructuredBuffer.

Byte Address Buffer

A byte address buffer is a buffer whose contents are addressable by a byte offset. Normally, the contents of a buffer are indexed per element using a stride for each element (S) and the element number (N) as given by S*N. A byte address buffer, which can also be called a raw buffer, uses a byte value offset from the beginning of the buffer to access data. The byte value must be a multiple of four so that it is DWORD aligned. If any other value is provided, behavior is undefined.

Shader model 5 introduces objects for accessing a read-only byte address buffer as well as a read-write byte address buffer. The contents of a byte address buffer is designed to be a 32-bit unsigned integer; if the value in the buffer is not really an unsigned integer, use a function such as asfloat to read it.

Unordered Access Buffer or Texture

An unordered access resource (which includes buffers, textures, and texture arrays - without multisampling), allows temporally unordered read/write access from multiple threads. This means that this resource type can be read/written simultaneously by multiple threads without generating memory conflicts through the use of Atomic Functions.

Create an unordered access buffer or texture by calling a function such as ID3D11Device::CreateBuffer or ID3D11Device::CreateTexture2D and passing in the D3D11_BIND_UNORDERED_ACCESS flag from the D3D11_BIND_FLAG enumeration.

Unordered access resources can only be bound to pixel shaders and compute shaders. During execution, pixel shaders or compute shaders running in parallel have the same unordered access resources bound.

Append and Consume Buffer

An append and consume buffer is a special type of an unordered resource that supports adding and removing values from the end of a buffer similar to the way a stack works.

An append and consume buffer must be a structured buffer:

Use these resources through their methods, these resources do not use resource variables.

Compute Shader Overview