4 replies to this topic

[jdub]

Is it a good idea to bind all textures to the pipeline during application initialization (given that I don't have a ridiculous amount of textures I'm using)?  Right now, my render code looks something like this (pseudo code):

void Render(void)
{
  ...
  SetTexture(this->get_mesh_texture(0));
  RenderTexture();
  ...
}

void SetTexture(Texture& t)
{
   ShaderResourceView textureView = createTextureView(t);
   this->shader->bindResource(textureView);
}

 

Does it incur a lot of overhead to be creating and binding a resource view every time I render a texture?

Edited by jdub, 06 February 2013 - 01:55 PM.

[Nik02]

Every time you "create" something, it is potentially expensive. Setting active shader resources, on the other hand, is not particularly expensive (apart from the associated driver call).

[jdub]

So given that the texture is already loaded from file and ready to go, creating a resource view for it isn't too expensive?

[MJP]

In terms of creating a D3D object, creating a resource view is probably one of the cheaper ones to create. That said, it's almost certainly still going to involve some sort of allocation so you don't want to do it unless you have to. Creating one every time you need to bind a texture is pretty wasteful, you should instead create the SRV whenever you create the texture and just hold onto it.

[Jason Z]

In terms of creating a D3D object, creating a resource view is probably one of the cheaper ones to create. That said, it's almost certainly still going to involve some sort of allocation so you don't want to do it unless you have to. Creating one every time you need to bind a texture is pretty wasteful, you should instead create the SRV whenever you create the texture and just hold onto it.

 

This is good advice - in fact, in my engine I don't separate the two concepts.  A resource is always referenced with its resource views with a single object, making it trivial to keep the existing reference around to the resource view.