D3D11 Stream Types

I have been wanting to cover more of the specifics on the new stream data types in upcoming Direct3D 11. Essentially what these types enable you to do is emit data without having to worry about order. That is, these are unordered data types; order is not preserved.

One application of the structured buffer stream types is emitting pixel data in a structure, from the pixel shader. In this scenario, it is necessary to determine how many structures are emitted - luckily, this can be manipulated without ever reading back from the GPU. D3D11 provides the CopyStructureCount method, to copy the number of written items into a buffer. That buffer can then be used with any of the draw indirect methods.