What one would want to retrieve the vertex data for? If you want to optimize vertices, you can always use MeshBuilder purely in runtime. If you want to build some geometric structure for the purpose of physics or some other calculations, you usually want to work on slightly simplified mesh or not even a tri-mesh. I'm curious...

Well, I guess you're right. I have probably read too many articles on efficient rendering in DX. I'm aware that C#/XNA is not C++/DX and it's purpose differs a bit. Unfortunately, my project is running out of time and I can't afford any more experiments. Please tell me, @Shawn (if you can), how did you achieved 9.2 microseconds? ...

Hi! Once again it's just me, but please, don't kill me yet. Slide 16 of Understanding XNA Framework Performance shows results of a very interesting experiment. It undoublty proves, that applying a set of effect parameters using the internally stored values of various cloned instances of effect is almost twice as fast as setting those ...

So say we all. You're the boss - you got the intel. When something exceeds the borders of our comprehension, the only thing we can trust is our faith, despite all the warnings. Many thanks for solving my puzzle. I really appreciate your help.

So I see true matter of my problems. I have DirectX SDK (August 2008) and I can read there: Technical Articles -> Top Issues for Windows Titles When profiling games, the top hotspots are often found to be related to entering and leaving critical sections. With the prevalence of multi-core CPUs, the use of multithreading in games has ...

Shawn Hargreaves on ContentManager: Yep. You have right, I was wrong - you can load assets without caching, managing it's lifespan freely. ContentManager can surely act as a singleton through the entire game. ContentReader class mislead me. I'm really ashamed that I didn't find this solution myself (that's why I came here with my ...

Indeed. GraphicsDeviceManager is a very handy brick in Game <-> GraphicsDevice relation. It holds GraphicsDevice which remembers it's resources. It is somehow necessary, as in DirectX 9.0c every resource created as D3DPOOL_DEFAULT needs to be manully destroyed before the device Reset() can be done. It is actually done in ...

As far as I have read many beliefs (example) on ContentManager internals and it's thread-safety, I'm still concerned about it's proper use in mult-threaded environment. Understanding XNA Framework Performance gives few hints in that matter: "ContentManager is not thread safe, but it's ok to have multiple instances, but only ...

Hi. @steffanp: Please, take a look at the picture below:   This is an example of an usage of very simple and old technique called texture splating. It was commonly used in variety of 3D games. I used Pudget Sound as a height map and ground map. Four pattern textures and a blend map are borrowed from Caesar IV, which uses this ...

Well I guess you're right. There is always an option of using ID3DXSprite but if I had to rewrite SpriteBatch class I would probably do it the same way it is done, so sorry for grumbling.