Some DirectCompute questions: Where is the "getting started" type documentation Will it run on XP? Thanx, and sorry if this info is already posted somewhere.

Is it possible to keep and use texture data in the shader from one draw to the next, without sending it back and forth between the CPU and GPU?

Thanks for the info and insight, that's what I was looking for.

What are the performance-limiting factors when simulating particles that all interact with each other?  Suppose a simulation is to be done with a large number of particles that interact through the force of gravity (ignoring collisions).  For commercially available graphics cards (used by game developers), could anyone offer a rough guess as ...

The problem could be in your draw call.  Is the stride correct (36)?

Suppose an arbitrary waveform is to be created at runtime (not loaded from a .wav file) and viewed oscilloscope-style so that the user can 1) play it through the speakers and 2) modify it in various ways such as changing the pitch, amplitude, adjusting a sample postion and so forth. Creating, storing and displaying the waveform I can manage, ...

Hmmm, if a poll on the occlusion query says the data is available, wouldn't that also serve as a flag that GetData could be done on the same rendertarget without causing a stall?

Thanks. Finally, is occlusion query the best way to do this (in other words, are there some other reasonable ways to communicate GPU data to the CPU?)

Thanks Shawn, your blog has some very helpful info.  If the CPU does something else for a while (say a couple of frames worth of time) before doing the getdata, would the getdata return immediately (i.e. no stall)?

What would be a good way to accomplish something such as this using the pixel shader : On a per-frame basis, count up the number of output pixels in a specified rectangle on the screen that fall into some range, for example, with the red component between 0 and 0.5.  Then, report this count back to the CPU once per frame. Any ...