Important

There are similarities between the IDataArray and the ITexelArray type. Both define potentially very large buffers of data, which can be read and written from both shaders and the CPU. There are distinct differences however. The ITexelArray type defines a regular array of vectors, with a specific list of supported types. Because the type is explicit and known by the hardware, automatic format conversion is supported for many data types when reading or writing from shaders. Additionally, an ITexelArray is able to alias an IIndexBuffer or an IVertexBuffer, allowing these buffers to be written from a shader, such as a compute shader. The IDataArray type on the other hand contains an array of structures, which are an arbitrary block of bytes. These data structures can be mapped to complex struct types within your shader, allowing a potentially large collection of differing types of values to be easily encoded in each entry of the array. The opaque nature of these structures to hardware however, means no automatic format conversion is possible, nor is it possible to alias an IIndexBuffer or IVertexBuffer. On the other hand, IDataArray can be used to perform indirect drawing, and atomic memory operations within shaders. You should consider the structure of your data and the features required, and select the array type which best fits your usage.