I know that it depends a lot on your specific situation,but obviously some state changes are heavier than others and since I don't know in depth about drivers or details about what exactly happens under the hood in the DirectX API,is there some sort of simplified chart of comparisons between the overhead caused by different state changes?Somewhere I heard that setting textures is the heaviest,while setting shader constants is the lightest(I'm probably wrong)

A lecturer of mine told me that changing a render state causes the gpu to pause for a moment. I'd also be interested to know this in more detail...

I'm also interested how exactly the Command Lists are sent to the gpu.I mean if the command list is sent all at once,this means it's just like a single state change per frame(ofcorse at the huge cpu cost of actualy putting the list together)?Or is it streamed bit by bit?