Hi, What I want to achieve is get all the pixel data of my rendering window without necessarily showing the window. I use a volume texture mapped onto multiple quads and with the use of alpha blending I display volumetric data. In some occasions I use just a single quad with a slice of the volume texture mapped onto it with no blending. Some of my work is done in shaders. Anyway, I need to get all the data of a frame displayed in the rendering window. Think of it as reading all the bytes from a still image. My ultimate goal is to pass this data (bytes) into a medical imaging viewer to use the image editing tools of the viewer. I could do all these operations on the CPU without using directX but it's slow and so I've done much of my work on the GPU side and ultimately I need this calculated image to be displayed via the viewer. It must be possible, isn't it? I use direct3D 9.

Quote:without necessarily showing the window

If this is your concern, when you create the window, don't call ShowWindow. Also, in your rendering loop, no need to call Present().

Is that what you're asking?

No I'm not asking this. I need to put all the information the window would have displayed into a byte array. That's what I'm asking.

Thanks for the replies guys you were both helpful. I had read about rendering to texture but I wanted to know about the most optimized way to do what I try to do. I assume Hinch's method is better and I'm going to look at it.

Is there any particular reason to prefer the System Memory than the Default pool Hinch?