Hi - I am having a bit of difficulty getting my head around how I should be approaching the following problem in D3D11:

My (simple) 3D game has 2 players, split screen showing the main forward views. Overwriting each of the 2 main views there are 2 smaller rectangles with the left & right side views. So in total: 2 main (non-overlapping) views and then 4 additional sub-views (overlapping). In D3D9 it was no problem I could clear the DepthStencilBuffer for each view's view-port and keep rendering to the back buffer in my swap chain. Not so easy in D3D11: I cannot seem to easily partially clear the DepthStencil Buffer.

I have a skybox effect that I can employ with a depthbuffer overwrite which, if I render first, should do the job... but is this the best way? - what if I have no sky...

This must be a common problem, and have seen some discussion in the forums on related issues but don't seem to have a clear understanding of alternative approaches. Insight appreciated.

It doesn't appear that there is any way to clear portions of a DSV. However, I would recommend just clearing the whole DSV at once, and then repopulating the content. Do you have the same update rates with each of the sub-views?

I hear you on clearing the whole DepthStencilBuffer and then repopulating (works for the 2 non-overlapping main views)... however, not for the overlapping sub-views.The sub-views are currently updating at the same rate... If they weren't I guess I would have to render them to a texture and render that texture to the screen each frame - right? In fact I may move to something like that in due course as I may need a mini-HUD/frame around the subviews and it does seem a waste to render them as frequently as the main view... Anyway - interested to hear general approaches to this that would be used... Thanks.

Thanks - that's helpful.