Rendering to multiple textures with one pass in directx 11

Question

I\'m trying to render to two textures with one pass using C++ directx 11 SDK. I want one texture to contain the color of each pixel of the result image (what I normally see on t

Answer 1

You need to use MRT (Multiple Render Targets) to render this in one pass.

You can bind both targets as output using OMSetRenderTargets

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476464(v=vs.85).aspx

There's an example in http://hieroglyph3.codeplex.com/ (DefferedRendering) which then shows how to write to both textures at once.

Here is a small sample :

ID3D11DeviceContext* deviceContext; //Your immediate context

ID3D11RenderTargetView* m_pRenderViews[2]; //Not more than D3D11_SIMULTANEOUS_RENDER_TARGET_COUNT (8)
m_pRenderViews[0] = pRTV1; //First target
m_pRenderViews[1] = pRTV2; //second target

deviceContext->OMSetRenderTargets(2, &m_pRenderViews[0], NULL); //NULL means no depth stencil attached

Then your pixel shader will need to output a structure instead of a single color:

struct PS_OUTPUT
{
    float4 Color: SV_Target0;
    float4 Normal: SV_Target1;
};

PS_OUTPUT PS(float4 p: SV_Position, float2 uv : TEXCOORD0)
{
      PS_OUTPUT output;
      output.Color = //Set first output
      output.Normal= //Set second output
      return output;
}

Also in DirectX11 you shouldn't need to write depth to your normal buffer, you can just use the depth buffer.

For Pixel/Compute shader sync, you can't run a pixel shader and a compute shader at the same time on the same device, so when your draw calls are finished, the textures are ready to use in compute for dispatch.