I've seen written all over the place, since DX10 the FFP is no longer supported and you need to set up shaders, otherwise there is no way to draw things. In basically every tutorials, in fact, you have to set up the input layout, fill in the "IA", etc.

But... I tried to not do any of that, and just create a vertex buffer, fill it with 3 (custom declared) "VERTEX" objects, and draw it. No shaders are being loaded, compiled, created nor set as active anywhere in the code, yet it renders a perfect moving triangle on screen.

Am I missing something very obvious here?

I set up the wievport, swapchain, DX11 device, etc., then create a vertex buffer and set it as active

D3D11_BUFFER_DESC bd;
ZeroMemory(&bd, sizeof(bd));

bd.Usage = D3D11_USAGE_DYNAMIC;
bd.ByteWidth = sizeof(VERTEX) * 3;
bd.BindFlags = D3D11_BIND_VERTEX_BUFFER;
bd.CPUAccessFlags = D3D11_CPU_ACCESS_WRITE;
hr = dev->CreateBuffer(&bd, NULL, &pVBuffer);

UINT stride = sizeof(VERTEX);
UINT offset = 0;
devcon->IASetVertexBuffers(0, 1, &pVBuffer, &stride, &offset);

Then, in the main frame function, create and update an array of three vertices...

devcon->ClearRenderTargetView(backbuffer, D3DXCOLOR(0.0f, 0.2f, 0.4f, 1.0f));

static float r = 0.5;
static float h = 0;

h += 0.001;

if (h >= 2 * D3DX_PI)
{
    h = 0;
}

vertices[0] = { r*cos(-(D3DX_PI / 6) + h), r*sin(-(D3DX_PI / 6) + h), 0.0, D3DXCOLOR(1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0) };
vertices[1] = { r*cos((D3DX_PI / 2) + h), r*sin((D3DX_PI / 2) + h), 0.0, D3DXCOLOR(0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0) };
vertices[2] = { r*cos(7 * (D3DX_PI / 6) + h), r*sin(7 * (D3DX_PI / 6) + h), 0.0, D3DXCOLOR(0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0) };

And fill the buffer, which is already active

fillBuffer<VERTEX[]>(dev, devcon, &pVBuffer, vertices, sizeof(VERTEX)*3);

...

template <typename T> HRESULT fillBuffer(ID3D11Device *dev, ID3D11DeviceContext *devcon, ID3D11Buffer **ppOut, T pIn, UINT vSize)
{
	HRESULT hr;

	D3D11_MAPPED_SUBRESOURCE ms;
	hr = devcon->Map(*ppOut, NULL, D3D11_MAP_WRITE_DISCARD, NULL, &ms);
	if (FAILED(hr))
		return hr;
	memcpy(ms.pData, pIn, vSize);
	devcon->Unmap(*ppOut, NULL);

	return S_OK;
}

Then I draw the triangle and present the frame

devcon->IASetPrimitiveTopology(D3D11_PRIMITIVE_TOPOLOGY_TRIANGLELIST);
devcon->Draw(3, 0);

return swapchain->Present(0, 0);

And voilà.

Admittedly, if I try to use the shader I was working on, the output image is exactly the same, but I tried cleaning every part of the code where the shader is used or set up and it still works. I even renamed the .hlsl file and recompiled everything to be sure. Could it be a caching/partial compilation issue?

Hmm, is it a general statement or did I do something very bad in my code?

I am including the FBX SDK .dll since I would have tried and tackled it in a later time, though I'm not doing anything with it. Could that be the problem?

Just call ID3D11DeviceContext::VSGetShader or ID3D11DeviceContext::PSGetShader to see what shader is bound.

They both return a null pointer, and for some reason now the GPU sometimes crashes when I attempt to start the program or resume it after pausing the debug... I'm not gonna attempt to run it without a shader anymore though, since the GPU apparently can't recover if it crashes a second time (thus requiring me to reboot). Maybe my GPU is just weird, I dunno.

Now, onto new and painful issues, since I just can't get the matrix buffer to be accepted by the shader...

There is no SetShader call active anywhere in the code, so it's most probably the second one.

And I know that isn't the way it's supposed to be done, I was just wondering why it just so happened to work magically like that.