Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

Appendix B: Direct3D 11 Queries

Throughout this book, we have explored in great detail the operations that Direct3D 11 makes available to a developer. This includes the ability to manipulate and control the individual actions carried out by modern high-performance GPUs. Since the GPU has evolved into such a sophisticated and specialized processor, there are many instances where the biggest bottleneck in an application is introduced when the CPU requires data that forces the GPU to stop what it is doing to respond to CPU’s request. For example, if the CPU requests that a buffer be mapped into system memory for reading, that buffer cannot be used by the GPU until the CPU releases it. This can lead to situations where the CPU is waiting for a response ...