rendering to 3DTexture performance question

Hi!

Since you have to specify which slice you want to render into in a geometry shader by using the semantic SV_RenderTargetArrayIndex, I'd suggest to use the geometry shader approach.

I would render 100 vertices as a point list, without actually binding a vertex buffer (so that you get 100 vertex shader invocations).

The vertex shader does nothing.

In the geometry shader you can take the SV_PrimitiveID (in 0..99) to specify the target slice to render into. Expand then a quad (as a triangle strip) with the coordinates (-1,-1,0) (-1,1,0) (1,-1,0) (1,1,0).

The pixel shader receives with SV_Position the texel coordinate in the slice. (Additionally you can pass the SV_PrimitiveID from the geometry shader to the pixel shader, if you need the slice id.)

Be careful, though, because SV_Position comes in as float, so better cast it to int.

You can also use a compute shader, if you want to avoid the rasterization pipeline. (Hard to tell, whether it will be faster, since you'd need to switch from the rasterization pipeline to the compute pipeline and back. If I recall correctly, I heard in a talk at gamefest someone mentioning that frequent switches are to avoid.)

Cheers!