Excellent! Many thanks to all who replied to this thread. And thanks to S1CA for finally being able to provide a good definition of what the pure device actually is. Because, as l99057j said, a search on Google yields practically no good information on pure devices. Even the SDK help file only seems to spend about one paragraph on them.

So, summing up: The pure device can be used to speed up your application by getting rid of (among others) unnecessary D3D checking. This comes at a cost, however, since everything you need to do has to be supported by the hardware.

That''s about it, right? Excellent. Thanks to you all for the input! Somebody should really do an article on this... The Articles & Resources section could use an article on pure devices. *looks at S1CA*

Thanks again, everyone! Ah, don''t these helpful threads feel good?