I am reading Focus on 2D in Direct3D right now, but I got confused with Vertex Buffer and Index Buffer. I pretty much understand what vertex buffers is, a collection of vertices that you want to render on the screen. But then, the author explains something about shared vertices. Like those in a rectangle, formed by 2 triangles, thus there are 6 vertices, but you only need 4 vertices. So, the author says:

quote:Focus on 2D in Direct3D, page 51 Rather than fill the vertex buffer with six vertices with duplicates, you can put only four vertices into vertex buffer, and place six entries in the index buffer.

I look at the DirectX SDK tutorials, in Tutorial 2: Rendering Vertices. The tutorial uses vertex buffer with four vertices to draw a rectangle, but it does not use any index buffer. So..what''s the point of index buffer? If I can fill in vertex buffer with only four vertices, why should I fill index buffer with six vertices? 500

Here is an example and explanation of what index buffers are in relation to vertex buffers and what the advantages are such as reducing your vertex usage less stress on the video card such as a terrain mesh made up of thousands of vertices.

http://www.andypike.com/tutorials/directx8/008.asp

As well as other dX8 tutorials.

http://www.andypike.com/tutorials/directx8/

Doug